Just the most recent adaptation of Thomas Hardy‘s romance novel, director Thomas Vinterberg‘s Far from the Madding Crowd is a painterly film, every image of it captured and displayed on screen is so rich and neatly framed, colors vibrant, landscapes captivatingly photographed. I don’t know much about the technical craft of shooting a film but this new take on the story results in a very appealing picture to look at from its first frame to its last. Unfortunately, the film’s beauty is too often found on the surface and not beneath it, a polished veneer without the underlying heart to fully sustain it.
Based on Hardy’s Brit-lit classic, Far from the Madding Crowd is set during the late 1800s, a time when men ran everything. Err, almost everything. Enter Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan), a successful, headstrong woman and the sole heir to one of the largest farms in the region, a woman who commands respect and garners adoration. Bathsheba’s primary problem seems to be that every man she comes across falls in love with her and wants to marry her, despite repeatedly rejecting their advances because she doesn’t want or need a man to protect her. News flash, fellas: she’s I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T, do you know what that means?
Much to her chagrin, Everdene — from whom The Hunger Games‘ bow-wielding protagonist Katniss gets her surname — attracts the attention of three very different suitors: Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts), a modest sheep farmer captivated by her fetching willfulness; William Boldwood (Michael Sheen), a prosperous and mature bachelor who wants to provide her security and stability; and Francis Troy (Tom Sturridge), a reckless Sergeant (with a mustache!) who seeks to satisfy her primal urges. If I’m Miss Everdene, I know who I’m picking, and her ultimate decision is obvious from the get-go, but the story is in the journey, not the destination.
However, this is the biggest problem I had with Far from the Madding Crowd. If you know where the story is going, whether you read the novel or are good at reading context clues, there has to be a reason to invest in the journey. In a romantic drama, said reason is typically the emotional arc of one or more of the main characters; here, Bathsheba serves as our proxy. We see life through her lens and feel the film’s emotions through her heart, or at least we are supposed to: Vinterberg and his screenwriter David Nicholls (Great Expectations) don’t always do the best job keeping us invested in her journey.
Carey Mulligan (Inside Llewyn Davis) plays Bathsheba wonderfully, an almost spellbinding presence made such by a range of attributes including poise, vulnerability, and a sincere belief in herself. She is a woman working not just among men but above them, and she does so well before women were really able to. She isn’t one to give in to the expectations of society, which would rather see her marry and raise children than watch over a farm. But her desires are in producing grains, not children, which makes her markedly progressive for her time. In large part, she is captivating and complex.
Over the course of the film Bathsheba winds up in romantic cahoots with all three of her suitors in some way, and, quite refreshingly, her playing the field is more matter-of-fact than talk-of-the-town. The men vie for her affections, and — mild spoilers ahead — midway through the film she marries one of them, but the relationship soon sours. Her husband grows to resent her and himself, and out of his depression he swims out to sea and drowns. When she is informed of her husband’s passing, the mood grows somber, and Vinterberg and Nicholls seem to want us to sympathize with her over her loss. The problem, however, is that no more than a couple scenes prior we saw her husband berate her, telling her he never really loved her. Perhaps it was just me, but I found it difficult to sympathize with her over the loss of an abusive man she never should have married in the first place.
There are a few other questionable moments, tonally, scenes that should have had some sort of emotional payoff but didn’t. There were, however, a few moments of genuine, intentional comedy among the romance and melodrama. Bathsheba is a charming character, and with her charm comes the ability to crack a joke and make light of a situation. However, these instances of genuine comedy get mixed in with scenes that were meant to be serious, but instead caused a chuckle, not only from myself, but also my fellow audience members, these were moments that pulled me out of the film.
As I mentioned though, this is a very beautifully captured film, reminiscent in ways of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, a favorite of mine from a couple years ago, though with a different color palette. Far from the Madding Crowd is largely composed of exterior shots, scenes where landscapes serve as the backdrop and natural light billows in to bring out the nuance in the costume design, the set decorations, and, most of all, the actors’ movements and expressions. Everything just sort of pops. Charlotte Bruus Christensen, who shot Vinterberg’s Oscar-nominated film The Hunt, is to credit here, as her work helps highlight the best in two very good performances from Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts, who share a significant amount of chemistry on-screen.
A couple years ago Vinterberg took me completely by surprise with The Hunt, a tense emotional drama so rich and complex I began to anticipate his followup, whatever it would be. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m focused on the future, as Far from the Madding Crowd has potential but doesn’t quite reach it. Too often its emotional beats are less than fully formed, almost like the strings that connect various bits of the story were severed in the editing room to keep the movie from running too long, but I wish Vinterberg had given it more room to breathe and develop. In the film, the suitors vying for Bathsheba’s hand want more of her than she can give, and similarly I wanted more from the film itself.
