Movie Review: "Far From The Madding Crowd" (Thomas Vinterberg, 2015)

A NEW CROWD, MORE MILD THAN MAD by Bennett Campbell Ferguson

Above: Bathsheba reborn--Carey Mulligan is Thomas Hardy's heroine.  Photo ©Fox Searchlight Pictures

I’m not sure how to begin.  As I sit here typing, thinking back on “Far From the Madding Crowd” (a period picture by director Thomas Vinterberg), I can’t help feeling conflicted.  It is not as if I abhorred the film.  Quite the contrary; it’s a thoughtful and thought-provoking story of love and class in 1800s England. 

Yet staring at its serene images of sloping fields and grubbily cheery farms, I couldn’t help feeling uneasy.  Those images are lovely, yes, but they would feel more at home on a dainty postcard than in an emotionally rippling narrative feature.  Translation: for all its sincerity and precision, Mr. Vinterberg’s movie never moves with the poetic force that it ought to.

            “Far From the Madding Crowd” begins (and ends) with Bathsheba.  She is played by Carey Mulligan, who we first see dressed in some kind of amber leather top, a perfect match for her cacao-colored mane.  Bathsheba is of no significant social stature; all the more remarkable that her uncle should bequeath her not only money, but an entire farm as her dominion.

            Great power doesn’t come with great responsibility only in superhero blockbusters.  As Bathsheba sits at her desk facing her new posse of farm workers, you can see both her determination to rule them and her quivering trepidation of doing the same.  Indeed, Bathsheba’s newfound power is the core of the movie—what pits her against the fiercely-principled shepherd Gabriel Oak (Mathias Schoenaerts) and beckons the romantic overtures of the prosperous farmer William Boldwood (Michael Sheen).

            I’m simplifying matters of course; Oak’s stoic compassion makes him far more than a noble foil and Boldwood’s obsessive affection singles him out as something more sincere (and more dangerous) than a suitor whose fancy has only lightly turned to love.  But isn’t Mr. Vinterberg guilty of simplifying matters himself?  In adapting the film from Thomas Hardy’s novel, he inherited a panoply of characters whose foibles render them recognizably human.  And how does he evoke their humanity?  Via images as hollow and static as those of a mid-range television production. 

            Just think what Terrence Malick might have done with this material!  In his hands, Mr. Vinterberg’s delicate flourishes (like a close-up a bumpy-skinned toad) and lush pallet of grassy greens might have risen to become swirling expressions of the mind storms that rage within Bathsheba, Boldwood, and Oak.  As it is, the job of stirring up some metaphorical blood is left to the actors.

             In the main, they all do a fine job of it.  Yet the man of these two hours is clearly Tom Sturridge.  Flouncing about as the nasty cavalry officer Francis Troy, he both beguiles and torments the indomitable Bathsheba.  Yet it is the image of him waiting for a different woman that stays with you.  Realizing that he’s been stood up, Troy shivers, looking at once tearful and terrifying.  Mr. Sturridge barely moves an inch during that scene.  Yet he convinces you that he’s capable of spitting righteous, selfish bitterness, even if the film around him isn’t.