Far from
the Madding Crowd
(2015)
Far from the Madding Crowd is just/yet another prestige
heritage adaptation, but one might have expected something a little less
perfunctory from Thomas Vinterberg, director of the nuanced The Hunt. His film feels like it has
been stripped to its bare essentials, while furnished with a populist
weightlessness that robs it of any depth or emotional substance. It’s a popcorn
classics production.
Admittedly,
my knowledge of Thomas Hardy’s novel extends no further than John Schlesinger’s
1967 big screen version, but since I rather like that one, and it didn’t seem
like it had come off a conveyer belt, I at least have a point of comparison. Vinterberg’s
film is blandly photogenic and, while Carey Mulligan’s chirpiness is well-disposed
to Bathsheba Everdene, she is let down by rather staid support who do little
but go through their paces, from Martin Sheen’s shotgun-wielding spurned elder
suitor to Tom Sturridge’s utter bounder Frank Troy. The first moment you see the
latter, you know he’s a frightful hound, although that may be down to
Sturridge’s weasely visage more than anything; either way, Bathsheba should
need no warning from Matthias Schoenaerts’ oak-solid Gabriel on being wise to
Troy’s failings as a specimen of humanity. Schoenaert’s performance as
sympathetic hunk is never quite believably angelic, and the uninspired
arrangement of characters and types ensures the outcome is never more than a
predictable fait accompli.
So much so,
as Far from the Madding Crowd progresses
it is reduced to a prettified obstacle course for Bathsheba to eventually find her
right man, the broad strokes reducing her to a groaningly incapable/dumb
headstrong girl in matters of the heart while getting behind her enthusiastically
as an independently-spirited career woman when it comes to farm management. The
landscape lacks the character with which Nicolas Roeg imbued Hardy; this looks
like any other latter-day countryside piece, with the colour dialled up in post
to glow abnormally. Albeit, the picture never remains still long enough to let
us take in its surroundings.
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