Movie review: Far from the Madding Crowd

By Katherine Monk

Before there was The Bachelorette, there was Bathsheba Everdene.  A surprisingly feisty heroine who emerged from Thomas Hardy’s pen in 1873, Bathsheba wasn’t your standard Victorian waif ominously coughing into her handkerchief.

Proud, independent and sexually self-possessed, she stood in stark contrast to the orphans of Dickens and the oppressed creatures created by the Brontës. By the same token, she wasn’t written on the grand scale as Hardy’s later classic, Tess of the d’Ubervilles.

As the central figure in the running serial that would eventually be published in novel form as Far From the Madding Crowd, Bathsheba Everdene was designed to be as accessible as possible: a single woman with modest resources, doing her best to make ends meet.

When we first meet her in Hardy’s book, it’s through the gaze of the neighbouring farmer, Gabriel Oak, a 28-year-old bachelor who thinks it may be time to settle down. The omniscient narrator tells us she looks “handsome” in a yellow wagon laden with household goods. He also tells us that Oak watches her from afar as she looks at herself in the mirror.

The hint of voyeurism feels threatening, but that’s just the beginning of Hardy’s genius as a storyteller. He creates these subtle lumps under a tightly knit rug of colourful descriptions and detailed plots, lending everything a very hushed sense of danger.

The suspense grows with every scene, too. It’s like a lottery jackpot that goes unclaimed every time Bathsheba escapes the next expected tragedy: the stakes get higher and higher.

It was a solid formula for selling Victorian serials, and it also proved rich enough to make the 1967 film adaptation with Julie Christie and Terence Stamp a Golden Globe contender for Best Picture.

But Thomas Vinterberg’s new spin on the old yarn works even better than John Shlesinger’s Vaseline-lensed romance because he finds the ironic, often overt, humour in Hardy’s prose.

Take the book’s most famous scene – “The Hollow amid the Ferns” – where our heroine, played here by the perfectly cast Carey Mulligan, goes for a walk with a handsome young soldier named Troy (Tom Sturridge). Aroused her presence, Troy decides to unsheathe his broadsword and display his talents. He thrusts and ripostes around her, taking the blade ever so close to her pounding heart, until she’s filled with undeniable desire.

Before Freud turned all this fun, flowery sexual metaphor into clinical examples of repression, readers could enjoy these breathless passages without guilt or fear of being called “filthy-minded.”

Vinterberg captures this pre-lapsarian feel that was the very backbone of the pastoral novel, and it makes a significant difference in tone because even though many terrible things happen over the course of the story, everything is grounded in the everydayness of rural existence.

Bad things happen — sheep end up at the bottom of a cliff, barns catch fire, people die – but life goes on.

Mulligan infuses Bathsheba with this unwavering practicality as well as a modern female sensibility, and the result is a screen heroine who makes you smile, even when she does uncharacteristically stupid things for the sake of driving the plot forward.

Hardy presents Bathsheba with three romantic candidates: the lovely-but-ordinary farmer Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts), the dashing sergeant Troy (Tom Sturridge) and the wealthy older man, William Boldwood (Michael Sheen).

Though it’s clear Oak would make the best mate, Vinterberg has to make us buy into the other two for the sake of drama, and he succeeds – thanks to the cast. Sturridge’s performance as Troy is so beautifully buffed, we only see a polished knob. And Sheen, as the vulnerable bachelor Boldwood, offers up the perfect balance of manly pride and embarrassingly urgent desire.

Schoenaerts has the bigger challenge because his character lacks defining edges. He’s comfortable in his own skin, but he’s uncomfortable around Bathsheba – which means his character depends on Mulligan’s performance, and whether or not we believe she could ever be attracted to the strong, silent type who knows how to pierce a sheep’s stomach without killing it.

No need to worry: Mulligan nails it. The actress who broke out with An Education captures all the positive energy that Bathsheba represented on the page as a voice of the people, possessed by collective common sense.

Thanks to her ability to convey a sense of adventure as well as an even keel, Far From the Madding Crowd has fun getting dirty, but never sinks into the morass of tragedy and tear-stained moirés.

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