Old Yorker

Thomas Vinterberg (2015)

Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, the first of his novels in which the term ‘Wessex’ was used to describe the geographical setting, is comfortably over four hundred pages in my Penguin edition.  John Schlesinger’s 1967 film of the book lasts two hours fifty minutes.  Thomas Vinterberg’s remake, with a screenplay by David Nicholls, shaves nearly an hour from the earlier film’s running time.  The result is a skilful piece of compression – and an enjoyable picture – but it reduces the scope and depth, as well as the length, of the story.  Far from the Madding Crowd could be very simply summarised as the story of one woman and her three suitors.  All four are substantial characters in Hardy – and in Schlesinger – but Vinterberg’s film is more sharply focused on the heroine.  With Polanski’s Tess (1979) as a forerunner and according to the continuing vogue for forename titles, it might have become ‘Bathsheba’, though I’m glad it didn’t.

Hardy’s Bathsheba Everdene is a young woman who, when she unexpectedly inherits her uncle’s farm, finds herself running a business and in charge of the men and women it employs.  She’s also determined to be in charge of her personal life – a determination expressed in her resistance to becoming someone’s wife.  Even before she has inherited the Weatherbury farm, Bathsheba has turned down the marriage proposal of Gabriel Oak, a young shepherd (although he’s six years older than she is) who is starting out as a tenant farmer.  She subsequently says no to an older and prosperous local farmer, William Boldwood; only because of Boldwood’s extreme persistence for a more promising answer, does she later modify her response to ‘not yet’.  Vinterberg and Nicholls depict Bathsheba as a would-be liberated woman before her time (Far from the Madding Crowd was a contemporary novel on its publication in 1874).  Carey Mulligan, who plays her, convinces you of the firmness of Bathsheba’s resolve.  Mulligan suggests a greater practical capability than Julie Christie did in the Schlesinger film and that Bathsheba, in asserting her independence, derives a satisfaction that goes beyond flirtatious amusement.

The salience of Bathsheba’s desire for self-determination in Vinterberg’s film makes her capitulation to the dashing, fickle Sergeant Troy all the more central to the drama.  Bathsheba realises she’s been knocked silly by Tom Sturridge’s Troy but it’s a mystery as to what she sees in him, and this seriously weakens the drama.  Sturridge looks the part in the very first shot of Troy on horseback, lined up with other soldiers in a town square and watched by a gathering of locals that includes his lover, the young country girl Fanny Robin (Juno Temple).  It’s downhill, though, from the moment that Sturridge starts to move and speak – he has the look of, and not much more human warmth than, a toy soldier.  It’s unfair to blame the actor entirely:  Sturridge didn’t cast himself.  But he majors on the character’s arrogant weakness and this is so apparent – so unconcealed by plausible charm and glamour – that there’s nothing for Bathsheba to be deceived by.   When Fanny Robin confuses All Saints and All Souls and turns up for her wedding to Troy at the wrong church, leaving him stranded at the altar, Sturridge is merely petulant – the viewer has no sense of Troy’s anger at having being made to look a fool in public.  The dazzle that Terence Stamp brought to the swordplay sequence – a highlight, in every way, of the Schlesinger film – would certainly be hard to emulate but Sturridge’s Troy, in the corresponding scene, seems just mildly sadistic (although Carey Mulligan is very good:  she looks genuinely ravished at the end of this episode).

When couples fall out at the start of mainstream screen romances, it’s not unusual for them to discover in due course that they’re made for each other, and the effect of Vinterberg’s early concentration on the relationship between Bathsheba and Gabriel is to make you feel they’re bound to end up together, as of course they do.  One’s sense of Gabriel as the leading man in the story is reinforced by Matthias Schoenaerts making him more charismatic than either Troy or Boldwood, excellent though Michael Sheen is in the latter role:  you keep watching Schoenaerts even when the two other men are centre stage.  He’s physically well equipped to play a man called Oak.  The contrast between his bulk and his facial and vocal sensitivity is very effective.

There are, in the middle of the film, some interesting exchanges between Gabriel and Bathsheba, in which she asks his advice.  He always seems disappointed at the end of these conversations, oppressed by the knowledge that Bathsheba regards him differently from the way he regards her.  (Carey Mulligan hints that Bathsheba realises this but is either unwilling or unable to do anything about it.)  Mulligan and Schoenaerts very nearly bring off the film’s closing scene, in which Bathsheba and Gabriel decide to wed.  It makes sense, given the characterisation of her throughout, that Bathsheba keeps urging Gabriel to propose to her again until he asserts himself, silencing her with a strong embrace and a prolonged kiss.  But their final walk into the sunrise together, although the tone is rightly subdued, is weak beside the trenchant postscript to the Schlesinger film.  This softening of the truth of Bathsheba and Gabriel’s relationship is foreshadowed at an early stage by David Nicholls’s substitution of the (present day) cliché ‘I will always be there for you’ for the words that Hardy puts in Gabriel’s mouth when he first proposes to Bathsheba:

‘And at home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be – and whenever I look up, there will be you.’

To Gabriel Oak, this is an image of wedded bliss; to Bathsheba Everdene, it’s a threat of being trapped for life – and would be all the more alarming to the Vinterberg-Nicholls version of Bathsheba.  The concluding implication that she and Gabriel were always-meant-to-be – the concluding lack of implication that he is second best (at best) – is an evasion.

It’s a pleasure to see Michael Sheen move impressively beyond his career as a big-screen impressionist (accomplished as those impressions often were).  He’s very affecting as the confirmed bachelor and reputedly passionless Boldwood.  There were times when I felt Sheen showed the man’s controlled desperation almost too eloquently and the script doesn’t enable him to suggest the less than controlled aspects of that desperation – at least until Boldwood shoots Troy dead (a sequence that is poorly staged and weakly melodramatic).  There are more times, though, when Sheen’s work is simply admirable.  The surfacing and obscuring of feelings that he, Matthias Schoenaerts and Carey Mulligan convey during the haymaking supper at Bathsheba’s farm are subtly powerful, and the same goes for other conversations between Boldwood and Oak.   According to Stephanie Zacharek, the lead actress ‘too often squinches her face in a self-satisfied smile’ but this expression is one of the cleverest elements of Carey Mulligan’s portrait of Bathsheba.  The teasing composure is a front that comes under repeated pressure and returns with increasing effort; Mulligan describes with fine variety and precision the emotional effects of fighting a losing battle for personal autonomy and fulfilment.

Juno Temple does well as Fanny but the role is seriously reduced:  we don’t even see her reaction to missing her own wedding.  The other significant role for a supporting actress, Bathsheba’s maid Liddy, is well played by Jessica Barden, who captures the character’s comic enthusiasm and more serious notes, but the other Weatherbury farm workers are very minor presences here – compared with both the novel and the 1967 film.  There’s little sense of the continuing life of a rural community – perhaps Thomas Vinterberg and David Nicholls, who clearly feel that Bathsheba needs to be presented as a woman to whom we can easily ‘relate’, were worried that a twenty-first-century audience would find the rustic chorus quaint and dull.  The Bathsheba-Boldwood duet at the haymaking supper and the more ribald singing of farm-workers at Troy’s celebration of his marriage, are both convincing:  it’s a pity there aren’t more social sequences of this kind.  Although the Dorset countryside is handsomely lit by Charlotte Bruns Christensen (who photographed Vinterberg’s previous film, The Hunt), the landscapes of the film rarely express more than pictorial beauty.  An exception is the dynamic sequence in which Gabriel races uphill in a vain attempt to prevent his flock, misled by an erratic sheepdog, from going over the edge of a cliff (and, when he fails, pounds the rocky ground in fury and frustration).

The composer, Craig Armstrong, has an impossible act to follow:  Richard Rodney Bennett’s wonderful score for John Schlesinger must always have been ringing in his ears but Armstrong does a creditable job with the music.  There’s a good deal of talent at work in this film, which is never less than absorbing.  But it feels, eventually, more like a reworking of Schlesinger than a re-interpretation of Hardy.  The look of the picture and the streamlining of the story understate, respectively, the changeable Wessex weather and the importance of human carelessness (the All Saints and All Souls mix-up, Bathsheba’s Valentine card to Boldwood) in dictating the events of Far from the Madding Crowd.  There’s no sense either of the irony that Hardy surely intended in the title of his book[1].  Perhaps ‘Bathsheba’ would have been a better title after all.

6 May 2015

[1]  As Lucasta Miller noted in her piece in The Guardian on 3 May:  ‘[The] very title – a quotation from Gray’s “Elegy written in a Country Churchyard” – is an ironic literary joke. Gray idealises the “noiseless” and “sequestered” calm of country life, where “sober wishes never learned to stray”; Hardy disrupts the idyll, and not just by introducing the sound and fury of an extreme plot into the pastoral world’.

John Schlesinger (1967)

I must have seen John Schlesinger’s film for the first time in the early 1970s, not long after reading Far from the Madding Crowd as an O-level set book.  I’d seen it at least once since then before going to this BFI screening a few days ago.  I watched it realising that part of its emotional pull was nostalgic but I’ve always liked the film and always had the idea I was in a minority in thinking well of it.  The current 72% ‘fresh’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes is thanks largely to the positive appraisals by reviewers that have appeared in recent weeks to coincide with the release of Thomas Vinterberg’s remake of the Hardy novel.  The negative judgments on Rotten Tomatoes are mostly in reprints of 1960s reviews.   Was Schlesinger’s film underrated on its original release?  Is distance in time now lending enchantment to the view?  Is it the Vinterberg version that’s making Schlesinger look good in retrospect?  Probably a bit of all three – probably more than a bit of the first.

The received wisdom has always been that Julie Christie’s Bathsheba Everdene is incongruous in place and time.  Penelope Houston (The Spectator, 26 October 1967) says that she ‘belongs ineluctably to the wrong century and the wrong context. Miss Everdene, one feels, is a weekender in Wessex’.  In contrast, among the 2015 re-reviewers, Peter Bradshaw thinks ‘Christie carries the film with her own insouciant vulnerability’ and Stephanie Zacharek praises the Schlesinger version for having ‘a star, Christie, whose mere presence is a kind of cliffside poetry’.  Zacharek’s review is looking for a stick with which to beat Thomas Vinterberg’s film, and Carey Mulligan’s Bathsheba in particular, but her words point up an essential difference between Mulligan and Julie Christie.  The former is the more accomplished actress, the latter a more effulgent screen presence.  Compared with Mulligan, Christie is not emotionally precise – she sometimes seems to be surfing the character – but she is consistent in presenting Bathsheba as wilful, flirtatious and selfish, to an extent that makes her unsympathetic.  The theatrical release poster in North America alerted audiences to the first two traits (the strapline was ‘A willful [sic] passionate girl and … the three men who want her!’) but not the third.  One of Julie Christie’s gifts is emotional transparency and Bathsheba’s consequently transparent selfishness may well have contributed to the commercial failure of Schlesinger’s film in the US (although it did well enough at the British box office).  Whereas the resolve of Carey Mulligan’s Bathsheba is rooted in the desire to be a fully liberated woman, Christie’s determination is born of an impulsive self-centredness:  when this Bathsheba is troubled, it’s because the dilemma she’s in is making things difficult for her.  It’s arguable that the Bathsheba of 2015, a gender-conscious and proudly capable manager, is more substantially incongruous in nineteenth-century Wessex than Schlesinger’s heroine.  The anachronistic elements of Christie’s Bathsheba seem, at this distance in time, to have less to do with her interpretation of the character than with her physical appearance (hairstyle, make-up and complexion).

Terence Stamp’s Sergeant Troy is occasionally hampered in a similar way:  when Troy is in civvies after resigning his military commission, the tight cut of his suit trousers looks to me (though I’m no expert) mid-1960s rather than mid-Victorian.  Penelope Houston was right to describe his performance as ‘all bits and pieces’; when Troy is showing that he’s a nasty piece of work, Stamp is uncomfortable, verging on wooden.  But the good ‘bits’ are very good:  he conveys effortlessly the combination of sexual allure and humour that captures Bathsheba’s heart.  He also makes you believe in Troy’s shallow popularity among the farm workers, in the early days of his marriage to Bathsheba:  when he sings a song at the harvest dance, Terence Stamp expresses a sense of Troy’s genuine enjoyment of being part of (and a man of power within) the Weatherbury farm community.  There’s a similarly euphoric quality in Troy’s showing off to Bathsheba in the deservedly famous swordplay sequence and a genuine uncertainty and inconstancy in his feelings for Fanny Robin, who is touchingly played by Prunella Ransome.  Both Stamp and Julie Christie, although they express the weak or displeasing aspects of their characters, also get across their confounding charm.

Peter Finch received the best reviews of the four main actors in 1967 and, though he looks too dashing, he is very fine as Boldwood.  He describes the corroding obsession of a man hitherto secure in routine and public esteem (and Boldwood’s plight is made more powerful by the extent to which it remains largely unnoticed).   Finch is especially moving in expressing Boldwood’s vast relief at receiving Bathsheba’s only modestly encouraging responses to his overtures.  Alan Bates’s Gabriel Oak is a noticeably well-spoken shepherd but this is an expertly judged performance and the longer running time of Schlesinger’s film allows Gabriel to recede into the background more than he does in Thomas Vinterberg’s.  Bates’s Gabriel is ever-present and watchful but his feelings are under wraps.  (I don’t agree with Penelope Houston that Bates wears the ‘confident, understated smile of the character who knows – and knows that we know – he will still be there at the end to claim the heroine’.)

The passage of time is an important feature of Schlesinger’s narrative, as James Price summarised in his Sight and Sound review (Winter 1967/8)[1], and it’s a timepiece that supplies a memorable closing scene.  (Just as well because the preceding scene, in which Bathsheba asks Gabriel not to leave and he insists he’ll stay only if they marry, is a botch – it’s too hurried.)  Troy buys as a wedding present for Bathsheba a clock in a glass dome, with various moving parts; a miniature, red-clad soldier comes out each time the clock chimes the hour.   Immediately after their wedding, Bathsheba and Gabriel are together in the parlour.  It’s raining outside.  Gabriel smiles at his wife; although she smiles back, she appears more interested in reading newspaper announcements of their marriage than in her new husband.  The claustrophobic effect is deepened when, as the hour strikes, the camera moves to the clock on the dresser and the soldier appears.  It is the very last shot of the film.  A mechanism that records the forward movement of time is also a reminder that the newlyweds are caught up in the past.

‘And at home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be – and whenever I look up, there will be you.’

These words of Gabriel, spoken when he first proposes marriage to Bathsheba and repeated when she finally accepts him, now ring ominously hollow.   Whenever Gabriel hears the clock, there will be Bathsheba’s real love.

The timespan of the film itself enables Schlesinger to give Far From the Madding Crowd something of the novel’s amplitude and to connect the dramatis personae with their physical environment. He is much assisted in this by Frederic Raphael’s screenplay, Richard Rodney Bennett’s music and Nicolas Roeg’s cinematography.  The beautiful blend of promise and melancholy in Bennett’s score is never too insistent but always contributes potently to the atmosphere.  The visuals bring out the scale and the textures of the landscape, and the vagaries of the Wessex weather.  There’s as much murk as there is sunshine, and Roeg gives a vivid impression of muddy, plashing ground and constricted spaces, as well as of the enormity of open ones.  The camera sometimes takes a God’s-eye view of the arena – or, at least, a view that suggests the littleness of human beings’ ability to control their fate.  At the same time, the film imparts a sense of careless cruelty, on the part of people as well as of nature – the harsher aspects of Christie’s and Stamp’s portraits of Bathsheba and Troy are a significant element of this.

Over the course of nearly three hours, Schlesinger is able to animate the rural community and to present the principals as both belonging to and standing apart from it.   There are some first-rate characterisations, comical and true, of the farm workers – especially Denise Coffey’s Soberness Miller, Brian Rawlinson’s Matthew Moon and, best of all, John Barrett’s Joseph Poorgrass. Fiona Walker is excellent as Bathsheba’s maid Liddy.   Schlesinger has assembled for the rustics a fine collection of faces:  John Garrie, as the malignant bailiff Pennyways, is particularly memorable and the character’s recurrence in the story (turning up like a bad Pennyways) is dramatically effective.  There are lovely, fresh moments, such as Bathsheba’s observing a small boy walking across a field, early in the morning, trying to memorise his catechism.  Richard Macdonald’s production design and the set decoration were for me almost entirely convincing (although the mugs used at the haymaking supper look a shade too pristine).

There are echoes of Sergeant Troy’s sexualised swordplay in his listless lashing at cliff-side grasses shortly before he disappears into the sea and during his back-from-the-dead reappearance at a travelling fair.  Both are, in a lower key, no less incisive than the primary scene that they evoke.  The scenes at the fair, where Troy gets a job playing Dick Turpin, call to mind an earlier sequence, invented by Raphael, in which people have gathered on the beach of a coastal resort to listen to a colourfully illustrated account of Captain Cook’s travels.  We gradually realise the rich resonances between these two episodes.  In the first of them, which takes place before Bathsheba’s marriage to Troy, we see – but don’t hear the words of – her impassioned appeal to him, which takes place in the background to the Captain Cook show.   At the travelling fair, Bathsheba and Boldwood are in the audience; Troy knows they are there and makes urgent attempts to disguise his appearance by applying extra highwayman make-up; as she watches the show, Bathsheba, although she doesn’t quite believe she is watching Troy, experiences a wordless shock of recognition.  The rustic audience’s delighted and sentimental reactions to, respectively, the slapstick humour of the Dick Turpin routine and the demise of his mare Black Bess turn the sequence into a fine piece of social observation as well as a moment of great suspense.   The film was criticised on its original release for excessive length but these various rhymes are all made possible by John Schlesinger’s taking time to tell the story.  Largely admiring reviews of his Far from the Madding Crowd have taken their time too but, nearly half a century on, here they now are.

13 May 2015

[1] ‘Gabriel Oak has to labour in silence while Bathsheba first flirts with Farmer Boldwood, then marries Troy, then seems inclined to bow to Boldwood again.  Boldwood is told by Bathsheba to wait until harvest, then to wait until Christmas, then to wait for six years.’