In 20 years, Danish director Thomas Vinterberg has strayed as far from his original reservation as one could imagine. He has evolved (some might say devolved) from the docu-like purity of the Dogme 95 movement, with its rejection of optical work and filters, special lighting, and genre plotting, to the latest film adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s sumptuous, glossy romance Far From the Madding Crowd.
Set among the bucolic splendor of the 19th-century English countryside — “200 miles outside London,” a subtitle tells us early on — Vinterberg’s Madding Crowd is breathtakingly shot, with regular cutaways to the region’s flora and fauna, the fields of gold and the plump fruit on the vine. Yes, Terence Malick would have done more with these settings — his intoxicated camera would lose itself in nature, perhaps at the expense of plot — but in a 21st-century prestige picture, we should be thankful for any moment of tranquility and reflection.
Carey Mulligan, fresh off a Tony Award nomination, is an impossibly slim Bathsheba Everdene, literature’s original independent woman, who inherits her late uncle’s farmland, house and business. Absent glamorous makeup, her cheeks blemished from labor, Mulligan’s beauty is as eccentric and captivating as her character: She’s a hardy (sorry) and masculine type driven to play on the same field as the boys, even if she won’t get paid the same respect (as evidenced by a telling moment at a grain sale, when her product sells for considerably less than her uncle’s).
She is pursued by three courters of various rank and class, creating a combustible love quadrangle: Matthias Schoenaerts’ Gabriel Oak, the callus-handed shepherd who loses his business and finds a second life on her farmstead; Michael Sheen’s William Boldwood, the haughty, tragic bachelor next door whose frequent marriage proposals are shockingly rebuffed; and Tom Sturridge’s Francis Troy, a loutish soldier who wins her heart with his military dazzle, before the skeletons in his closet rattle to the fore.
While it would be impossible on film to capture every exhaustible character detail of Hardy’s book — John Shlesinger’s 1967 version, running an additional 50 minutes, might get closer — Vinterberg probes select scenes with a feverish, visceral intensity. The story proceeds over the duration of several years, but Vinterberg never provides dates, lest they break up the movie’s spellbinding dance of romance and repression, its dreamlike procession of lustful gazes, rejected proposals and sensual rendezvous.
Vinterberg betrays his Scandinavian film heritage in some of the most harrowing scenes in Madding Crowd, like the candlelit wake for Fanny Robbin (Juno Temple), Sgt. Troy’s jilted fiancée. Like all the film’s best scenes, it’s shot as a chamber drama of tortured close-ups dominating the CinemaScope frame, conjuring the spirits of Dreyer and Bergman.
There could have been more of this operatic, atmospheric intensity and fewer of the easy shortcuts Vinterberg occasionally employs: There’s nothing like a cutaway to a whimpering dog, for instance, to manipulate our emotions. But if this tale proceeds with a certain amount of cliché — a supposedly dead guy washing up again at a key moment, like in a torrid soap — it’s on Hardy, not Vinterberg, and should be understood with the caveat that Hardy more or less invented scenarios that have become tropes. If the story seems musty to 2015 eyes, it’s because we’ve seen it watered down too many times.
What continues to stand out is the radical feminism of Far From the Madding Crowd. There is something deeply satisfying and doggedly relevant about hearing Bathsheba state, “I want a husband. I’d hate to be some man’s property.” In a Hollywood that still produces a depressing dearth of complex female roles, her independence, her intransigence and her sometimes wrong-headedness are a glorious affront to a male-dominated industry, no matter how familiar and sanguine the end result.
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD. Director: Thomas Vinterberg; Cast: Carey Mulligan, Matthias Schoenaert, Michael Sheen, Tom Sturridge, Juno Temple, Jessica Barden; Distributor: Fox Searchlight; Rating: PG-13; Opens: Friday at select theaters