Michael Winterbottom (1996)

BBC4’s Thomas Hardy season got off to a fine start with A Haunted Man, a 1978 drama-documentary focusing on the breakdown of Hardy’s first marriage to Emma Gifford and the remorseful love poems that he wrote after her death.  Cyril Luckham and Billie Whitelaw appeared as Hardy and Emma in short dramatic reconstructions; their readings of poems and diary extracts were exceptional – really wonderful – and Caroline Blakiston supplied a well-judged narrative voiceover.  The next evening’s line-up featured Jude, preceded by one of BBC4’s short ‘X Remembers … Y’ pieces.  I’d not previously seen Michael Winterbottom’s version of Jude the Obscure and there’s no denying that ‘Christopher Eccleston Remembers … Jude’ coloured my reactions to the film.  I’ll try not to let that dominate what I write next though I’m sure Eccleston’s view of Hardy’s novel and its protagonist got in the way of his performance.

A typical edition of Jude the Obscure runs to several hundred pages; this screen adaptation, scripted by Hossein Amini, is barely more than two hours long.  Thomas Vinterberg’s similarly compact remake of Far from the Madding Crowd (2015) is a good film but I recall watching it grateful that I could relate Vinterberg’s streamlined version to the larger context of the novel, which I know fairly well.  In contrast, I’ve never returned to Jude the Obscure since struggling through it as a teenager.  Even with a limited recollection of the book, though, Winterbottom’s film feels exceedingly abbreviated – feels like ‘Scenes from Jude the Obscure’.  The film omits a lot, and not only peripheral elements.  For example, Hardy’s Jude Fawley is a religious believer in his youth while his cousin, Sue Bridehead, with whom he falls in love (as she does with him), is agnostic – she has no time for the Christian church or its institutions.  By the closing stages of the story, these positions, thanks to a series of traumatic events in the pair’s lives, are effectively reversed but Winterbottom hardly bothers to show Jude moving away from Christianity.  The film ends with what may be his and Sue’s parting company for the last time but which isn’t the final parting that Jude’s death in the novel puts beyond doubt.

When Jude Fawley is still a young boy (James Daley), the village schoolteacher, Mr Phillotson (Liam Cunningham), points out on the far horizon the spires of a town called Christminster:  if you want to be anything in life, Phillotson tells Jude, this place of learning is where you need to get to.  It’s where Phillotson, about to leave the village, is now heading.  (In ‘Remembering …’ Christopher Eccleston said that ‘we all know’ Christminster is Cambridge:  most people have taken it to be Oxford.)  The young man Jude (Eccleston) has taught himself Latin and Greek, and is determined to be a scholar.  His plans are derailed by a romance with a local girl, Arabella Donn (Rachel Griffiths); when she tells him she’s pregnant, Jude feels obliged to marry her and gets work as a stonemason.  Arabella isn’t pregnant and, a few months later, leaves her husband.  Jude heads for Christminster, at first earning his living there as a stonemason but hoping to gain admission to the university.  He also meets up with Sue Bridehead (Kate Winslet) and renews acquaintance with Phillotson, now a primary school teacher in Christminster.  At Jude’s urging, Phillotson takes on Sue as an assistant and falls for her, despite the large age difference between them.  Although she loves Jude, Sue, when she learns about Arabella, reluctantly accepts Phillotson’s proposal and they marry.  It’s poignantly apt that, at the wedding service, Jude gives Sue away.

The hero’s frustrated scholarship, crucial to the novel, is central to Jude too but the compressed narrative makes it hard for Winterbottom to convey Jude’s love of learning as well as his academic ambition.  Every so often, Eccleston’s Jude, at his books, reads a bit of Latin or Greek aloud but you’re not sure why:  in retrospect, these bits seem like rehearsal for one of the film’s big sequences, when Jude recites the Nicene Creed in a busy pub.  In his cups, he tells his fellow stone workers that he knows the creed in Latin; a Christminster undergraduate, also drunk, overhears and goads Jude into proving it.  As the derisive student, David Tennant, in his first feature film role, is on screen for just a few seconds, long enough for you to see why he got more work.  The scene goes wrong, though.  As soon as he leaps onto a table and starts the recitation, Eccleston drops Jude’s inebriation in favour of righteous anger.  There are different social groups in the pub – the posh undergraduates, various working men.  When Jude abruptly reverts to English to jeer at the company – they’ve no idea, he announces, whether or not he’s got the Latin right – no one replies, even to tell him to shut up.  Once he eventually does so, the pub’s other customers just resume drinking.  In one sense, you can understand their lack of reaction – everyone must be relieved when Jude’s performance is over.  But is vague anti-climax what Winterbottom intended?

Knowledge of the novel will also ensure a better understanding than a viewer gets from the film alone of Jude and Sue’s determination, after her marriage to Phillotson fails, to live together but not wed.  It seems they’re not legally prevented from marrying, even though Jude, unlike Hardy’s novel, blurs the terms on which Phillotson agrees to let Sue go off with Jude.  (It is clear in the film that Jude and Arabella divorce.)  There’s a brief scene in which Sue volubly disparages the Church and marriage but it’s hardly enough to explain why, later in the story, she and Jude don’t at least pretend to be husband and wife.  By this stage, they have three young children to care for but face repeated difficulties because they’re upfront about their unconventional partnership.  Jude, working on a masonry assignment, is fired by a regretful church official (Paul Copley) because parishioners have complained that the mason and his woman are living in sin.  (Jude seems astonished to get the push – a reaction that’s rather astonishing in itself.)  Homeless and nearly penniless, the family then gets a roof over their heads but only for one night – this again because Jude and Sue aren’t Mr and Mrs.

The eldest of the three children is Juey (Ross Colvin Turnbull), the son of Jude and Arabella, who wasn’t expecting when she tricked Jude into marriage but was by the time she deserted him and emigrated to Australia.  She made a bigamous marriage there.  Arabella returns to England temporarily to ask for a divorce; soon afterwards, Juey arrives to live with his biological father.  Once Sue overcomes her aversion to having sex, she and Jude have two children of their own.  When Juey asks why they can’t stay more than one night in their new lodgings, Sue rashly replies that it’s because ‘there are too many of us’.  This greatly troubles the boy and Jude’s reassurances are in vain; next morning, Jude and Sue come back to the lodgings, buoyant because Jude has found employment, to discover a note from Juey.  All three children are dead, Juey having killed his half-siblings and hanged himself ‘Becos we were to menny’.   Winterbottom’s staging of this terrible discovery – a tragedy that triggers Sue’s guilt-ridden embrace of religion, separation from Jude and eventual return to Phillotson – is, like the pub scene, strangely indecisive.  When Jude picks up each of the dead children, you could understand if he performed the action either with great tenderness or, in an attempt to shut out the horror of what’s happened, in a seemingly businesslike way.  Christopher Eccleston suggests neither of those things.

This half-heartedness isn’t at all typical, however, of Eccleston’s playing.  In his curtain-raiser slot, he railed against the British class system that thwarted the likes of Jude Fawley and which, according to Eccleston, continues to prevent working-class actors like him from realising their full potential – and is getting worse.  (Eccleston said that if he were starting out today he simply couldn’t be an actor.)  A strong but undifferentiated resentment dominates his portrait of Jude.  Whether things go wrong in his romantic life or he receives a rejection letter from the university at Christminster advising him to stick to his trade rather than try to use his brain, Eccleston is oppressed in the same way, passionately but fuzzily pissed off.  His ‘Remembering’ monologue sometimes verged on it’s-grim-up-North spoof (bringing to mind Jim Broadbent’s writer in the Victoria Wood sketch, a man who ‘bleed[s] for the North’ but lives in Chiswick).  Eccleston explained his fellow Lancastrian Winterbottom’s insistence on filming the rural scenes not in Dorset but in Yorkshire and Lancashire – because the film’s ‘psychological landscape … it’s hard and it’s tough and it’s rugged’.  One in the eye for softie southerner Thomas Hardy, though perhaps some consolation to him that, as Eccleston went on to acknowledge, they also did location filming in New Zealand.

It must be said that DP Eduardo Serra’s cinematography is expressive whatever the landscape and Eccleston reasonably praised Adrian Johnston’s fluid music for the film.  What chiefly saves Jude, though, are the main performances other than the lead’s.  Kate Winslet, in an early cinema role, is amazingly vivid and sparky – so that Sue’s increasing melancholy, unlike Jude’s, has real impact.  (Eccleston’s best moments come when he lets down his political guard – lets himself react naturally to Winslet.)  The narrative condensation means that Rachel Griffiths’ Arabella keeps turning up like a bad penny in a nearly comical way but Griffiths is nuanced and makes it easier to sympathise with the character than you might expect.  Liam Cunningham is surprising casting:  he’s probably too young and good-looking to play a man whose twenty-plus-years younger wife finds him physically repellent.  (He’s fourteen years older than Kate Winslet and only three years older than Christopher Eccleston.)  Yet Cunningham’s face conveys Phillotson’s different disappointments – with how Christminster and how marriage turn out for him – in ways that you miss in the film’s Jude.  June Whitfield is also good, in the smaller but important role of Jude’s loving but alertly critical aunt, whose warnings to her nephew that the Fawleys ‘aren’t cut out for marriage’ prove powerfully ironic.

31 October 2024