Along with a great novelist’s assumed ability to peer into the human soul and all that, Thomas Hardy added two key obsessions: land and time. Hardy knew the soil of his English countryside, knew the trees and animals, and the way a footpath connects farms and destinies.
He also knew how the turning of the seasons affected people, and how those same footpaths resonated with the steps of ancestors near and distant.
Thomas Vinterberg’s new version of “Far from the Madding Crowd” gets just about all of that wrong. And immediately, too: The film throws away the great moment when Bathsheba Everdene (played here by Carey Mulligan) — having assured herself that no one could be watching — leans back on her horse in an unladylike manner, a gesture surreptitiously witnessed by salt-of-the-earth farmer Gabriel Oak (Belgian rising star Matthias Schoenaerts).
If a movie can’t understand how that gesture shapes the futures of these characters, it won’t get much else right. Even worse is the hurry-up swiftness of David Nicholls’ screenplay, which collapses the action so the movie can trot in at 118 minutes.
We’ve just established the impossible relationship between prideful-but-poor Bathsheba and sensible Gabriel when she inherits her uncle’s estate, flirts with neighboring landowner William Boldwood (Michael Sheen), and falls under the spell of caddish soldier Francis Troy (Tom Sturridge). The melodrama that has room to breathe in Hardy’s 1874 novel (and the 170-minute 1967 adaptation of the story) is so rushed here that it looks faintly ridiculous.
Maybe that was Vinterberg’s purpose; he was one of the Danish filmmakers whose Dogma credo — as embodied in his film “The Celebration” — was supposedly against this kind of old-fashioned material.
That 1967 film may not be a classic, but it contained unforgettable sequences — a storm on the farm, and an earthy, gut-piercing remedy to save swollen sheep. And it had a dazzling cast.
Carey Mulligan, late of “The Great Gatsby,” is a brave lass indeed to step into the footsteps of Julie Christie. If she can’t supply the movie-star oomph, she still navigates the movie’s confused conception of the character with professionalism, and her chemistry with hunky Schoenaerts is visible.
The movie’s clumsiness is so desperate that Bathsheba is given a one-time-only burst of voiceover at the beginning of the film in order to plead ignorance about her supposedly mystifying name (no one has told her the biblical reference?), as though preparing a 21st-century audience for something unfamiliar. Even her namesake Katniss Everdeen didn’t have to stoop that low.
“Far from the Madding Crowd” (2 stars)
The Thomas Hardy novel is given a rushed treatment that makes the plotting seem faintly ridiculous. Carey Mulligan stars as a woman torn between three men (Matthias Schoenaerts, Michael Sheen, Tom Sturridge) as she goes about the duties on her English farm.
Rating: PG-13, for subject matter
Showing: Sundance Cinemas, Meridian
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