Chris Knipp
05-09-2015, 04:03 AM
Thomas Vinterberg: Far from the Madding Crowd (2015)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/troy.jpg
A lady farmer must choose between a sad poor man, a sad rich man, and a bounder. She picks the bounder. Vinterberg's new version of Hardy's novel is reasonably effective but shrunken and too fast-paced.
Thomas Vintaerberg is the Danish filmmaker best known for Celebration, his talky 1998 Dogme-style study of family dysfunction played out at a big family reunion. He seems to have wandered since, with two films in English with American actors that got terrible reviews, and a Danish one that went straight to DVD. But his 2012 The Hunt is a well-crafted film in Danish about the frame-up of an elementary school teacher based on rumors, with a terrific performance by Mads Mikkelsen.
This time Vinterberg has gone in another direction, with a moderately watchable version of Thomas Hardy's classic 1874 English novel, adapted by David Nicholls. It was last filmed in 1967 in a three-hour, 70 mm. movie by John Schlesinger, starring Julie Christie, Terrence Stamp, Alan Bates, and Peter Finch, and you can hardly believe the new cast, Carey Mulligan, Tom Sturridge, or Michael Sheen could match up. There's just one cast member with authority and charisma to burn -- the extravagantly gifted Matthias Schoenaerts (Bullhead, Rust and Bone, The Drop).
This is the story of three men and a woman. Attention is evenly divided among these main characters in the novel, whereas here all the focus is on Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan), a farming lady in the West of England. When Miss Everdene hasn't much money, the earthy shepherd Gabriel Oaks (Schoenaerts) proposes to her, but she politely declines. He remains patient and devoted, ready to wait forever; he moves away, but a series of dramatic turns of fortune and coincidences bring him back. After he is bankrupted by losing his herd of sheep, he also becomes an invaluable farm manager for Miss Everdene, who has inherited a solid farm property. Then the richest man in the region, William Boldwood (Sheen), who has a huge house, a lot of land, and "some very interesting pigs," among other possessions, proposes to Miss Everdene, and she declines his offer as she has Mr. Oak's. Boldwood is rich, patient, and devoted, ready to wait, but older, so he can't wait forever.
In Miss Everdene's opinion -- and this can be interpreted as "feminist" and "modern" -- she has no particular need of a husband. Not till Sergeant Francis Troy (Sturridge) appears, wearing a dashing red uniform, and she gets her first kiss and her first-and-last display of dangerously close rapid sword manipulation, a carnival turn taken to be orgasmic for her. Troy is a toy-man, an attractive young twit, like Count Vronsky in Anna Karenina (Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Joe Wright's disastrous recent version). She marries him, and she really doesn't need that. Troy is a standard-issue rotter: he doesn't share in the farm work, and loses money at gambling. Worse yet, it turns out his heart belongs to Miss Everdene's former servant, Fanny Robin (Juno Temple), whose fate takes some very 19th-century, Dickensian, turns.
Schoenaerts projects the goodness and courage of his character, adding his own soulfulness and sex appeal. But he's Belgian. He can play in fluent Flemish, French, or English. He can't do a West Country accent. Then again, as Anthony Lane points out in The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/fighting-on), nobody else in the cast can either. This is a version pared down to essentials. Vinterberg and his writer, as Lane says, are primarily "addressing a new generation, which knows neither the earlier film nor the book." But that doesn't mean there is anything radical here. This is a BBC Eng.Lit. classic movie and therefore is conventional, as such adaptations nearly always are, with rare exceptions like Andrea Arnold's highly experimental 2012 Wuthering Heights (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2214), which made me feel as if I were watching a 19th-century version of Robert Frank's 1961 mystical short based on Isaac Babel, The Sin of Jesus.
Filmmakers don't get that bold with the Eng.Lit classics very often. Vinterberg's Madding Crowd has the standard glossy look, with the very retro element of an overbearing, if melodious, full string orchestra sweeping us into and out of every rapid scene-change. As Foundas says in his Variety (http://variety.com/2015/film/reviews/far-from-the-madding-crowd-review-1201464632/) review, "the 'Downton Abbey' set will find much to enjoy here."
The editing reinforces the paring down with a vengeance. It's so fast a man commits a crime and is immediately being shut into a jail cell, as if it all happened on one minimal stage. It conveys a sense of energy that's palpable, and some emotion, even if that's mostly repressed. What gets lost in such fast cutting is any real sense of the passage of time. That's what longeurs are for. Vinterberg's version is vivid and captures the book's main action. I'm not sure it has enough unique about it or is gloriously complete enough as a reimagining of the 464-page novel to be long remembered. The physical action when Oaks rushes to the rescue, is energetic, and the sun-drenched wheat fields, recalling Breugel, are memorable: they will remain when the rest has faded.
Vinterberg cut out a whole big scene in a market that foretells a dramatic reappearance ahead of time. Schlesinger's movie was an hour longer than this one, and featured that scene. Lane thinks Vinterberg "wants his twists to hang back, and then to come out of nowhere, like thunder." But it all comes like thunder, and you're bombarded.
You wish Sturridge were better. You wish Sheen were more sympathetic. You wish Mulligan were beautiful, as Bathsheba Eberdene is meant to be and Julie Christie was. Mulligan is strong, real, and convincing. As I hinted, Schoenaerts glows, and exudes trustworthiness and goodness. You assume he sees something in Miss Eberdene we miss out on. I have tended to be immune to Mulligan's charms. But this is her best role since Lone Scherfig's An Education (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2672-AN-EDUCATION-(Lone-Scherfig-2009)&p=23099#post23099).
Obviously, this is above all the portrait of an independent woman -- except that, as is typical for Hardy's women, she does not have a happy life; and the happy ending may seem tacked on. Even though it's in the novel, it feels like a Hollywood last minute test-audience switcheroo.
Far From the Madding Crowd, 119 mins., debuted at several festivals in April 2015, and opened in the US and UK 1 May (in the US a Fox Searchlight release).
http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/troy.jpg
A lady farmer must choose between a sad poor man, a sad rich man, and a bounder. She picks the bounder. Vinterberg's new version of Hardy's novel is reasonably effective but shrunken and too fast-paced.
Thomas Vintaerberg is the Danish filmmaker best known for Celebration, his talky 1998 Dogme-style study of family dysfunction played out at a big family reunion. He seems to have wandered since, with two films in English with American actors that got terrible reviews, and a Danish one that went straight to DVD. But his 2012 The Hunt is a well-crafted film in Danish about the frame-up of an elementary school teacher based on rumors, with a terrific performance by Mads Mikkelsen.
This time Vinterberg has gone in another direction, with a moderately watchable version of Thomas Hardy's classic 1874 English novel, adapted by David Nicholls. It was last filmed in 1967 in a three-hour, 70 mm. movie by John Schlesinger, starring Julie Christie, Terrence Stamp, Alan Bates, and Peter Finch, and you can hardly believe the new cast, Carey Mulligan, Tom Sturridge, or Michael Sheen could match up. There's just one cast member with authority and charisma to burn -- the extravagantly gifted Matthias Schoenaerts (Bullhead, Rust and Bone, The Drop).
This is the story of three men and a woman. Attention is evenly divided among these main characters in the novel, whereas here all the focus is on Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan), a farming lady in the West of England. When Miss Everdene hasn't much money, the earthy shepherd Gabriel Oaks (Schoenaerts) proposes to her, but she politely declines. He remains patient and devoted, ready to wait forever; he moves away, but a series of dramatic turns of fortune and coincidences bring him back. After he is bankrupted by losing his herd of sheep, he also becomes an invaluable farm manager for Miss Everdene, who has inherited a solid farm property. Then the richest man in the region, William Boldwood (Sheen), who has a huge house, a lot of land, and "some very interesting pigs," among other possessions, proposes to Miss Everdene, and she declines his offer as she has Mr. Oak's. Boldwood is rich, patient, and devoted, ready to wait, but older, so he can't wait forever.
In Miss Everdene's opinion -- and this can be interpreted as "feminist" and "modern" -- she has no particular need of a husband. Not till Sergeant Francis Troy (Sturridge) appears, wearing a dashing red uniform, and she gets her first kiss and her first-and-last display of dangerously close rapid sword manipulation, a carnival turn taken to be orgasmic for her. Troy is a toy-man, an attractive young twit, like Count Vronsky in Anna Karenina (Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Joe Wright's disastrous recent version). She marries him, and she really doesn't need that. Troy is a standard-issue rotter: he doesn't share in the farm work, and loses money at gambling. Worse yet, it turns out his heart belongs to Miss Everdene's former servant, Fanny Robin (Juno Temple), whose fate takes some very 19th-century, Dickensian, turns.
Schoenaerts projects the goodness and courage of his character, adding his own soulfulness and sex appeal. But he's Belgian. He can play in fluent Flemish, French, or English. He can't do a West Country accent. Then again, as Anthony Lane points out in The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/fighting-on), nobody else in the cast can either. This is a version pared down to essentials. Vinterberg and his writer, as Lane says, are primarily "addressing a new generation, which knows neither the earlier film nor the book." But that doesn't mean there is anything radical here. This is a BBC Eng.Lit. classic movie and therefore is conventional, as such adaptations nearly always are, with rare exceptions like Andrea Arnold's highly experimental 2012 Wuthering Heights (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2214), which made me feel as if I were watching a 19th-century version of Robert Frank's 1961 mystical short based on Isaac Babel, The Sin of Jesus.
Filmmakers don't get that bold with the Eng.Lit classics very often. Vinterberg's Madding Crowd has the standard glossy look, with the very retro element of an overbearing, if melodious, full string orchestra sweeping us into and out of every rapid scene-change. As Foundas says in his Variety (http://variety.com/2015/film/reviews/far-from-the-madding-crowd-review-1201464632/) review, "the 'Downton Abbey' set will find much to enjoy here."
The editing reinforces the paring down with a vengeance. It's so fast a man commits a crime and is immediately being shut into a jail cell, as if it all happened on one minimal stage. It conveys a sense of energy that's palpable, and some emotion, even if that's mostly repressed. What gets lost in such fast cutting is any real sense of the passage of time. That's what longeurs are for. Vinterberg's version is vivid and captures the book's main action. I'm not sure it has enough unique about it or is gloriously complete enough as a reimagining of the 464-page novel to be long remembered. The physical action when Oaks rushes to the rescue, is energetic, and the sun-drenched wheat fields, recalling Breugel, are memorable: they will remain when the rest has faded.
Vinterberg cut out a whole big scene in a market that foretells a dramatic reappearance ahead of time. Schlesinger's movie was an hour longer than this one, and featured that scene. Lane thinks Vinterberg "wants his twists to hang back, and then to come out of nowhere, like thunder." But it all comes like thunder, and you're bombarded.
You wish Sturridge were better. You wish Sheen were more sympathetic. You wish Mulligan were beautiful, as Bathsheba Eberdene is meant to be and Julie Christie was. Mulligan is strong, real, and convincing. As I hinted, Schoenaerts glows, and exudes trustworthiness and goodness. You assume he sees something in Miss Eberdene we miss out on. I have tended to be immune to Mulligan's charms. But this is her best role since Lone Scherfig's An Education (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2672-AN-EDUCATION-(Lone-Scherfig-2009)&p=23099#post23099).
Obviously, this is above all the portrait of an independent woman -- except that, as is typical for Hardy's women, she does not have a happy life; and the happy ending may seem tacked on. Even though it's in the novel, it feels like a Hollywood last minute test-audience switcheroo.
Far From the Madding Crowd, 119 mins., debuted at several festivals in April 2015, and opened in the US and UK 1 May (in the US a Fox Searchlight release).