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 wasn’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 virtually tells Gabriel to marry her, although he then asserts himself and silences her with a strong embrace and a 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 haymaking supper – the intertwining of the principals’ serious but unspoken emotional business and the rustics having raucous fun – is so well done that it’s a pity there aren’t other 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’.