Far From the Madding Crowd Doesn't Do Justice to Hardy's Novel

Though it’s hard to believe in 2015, there was a time when fictional heroines didn’t have to be role models, when a character’s backbone could be more than just a row of vertebrae lined up into teachable moments. It’s wonderful that modern readers love Jane Austen — we still warm to the vitality of her characters and to their defiant code of self-determination, for good reason — but the popular conception of her work has recast it as a kind of female-empowerment petting zoo, a place to go for “You go, girl!” strokes. The phrase “strong woman character” has come to mean almost nothing, a trend that diminishes the power of independence rather than intensifies it. It’s as if, instead of taking the measure of a character, flaws and all, we’re always subconsciously adding the tagline “She’s really smart — for a girl.”

Is Thomas Hardy, whose socially progressive views found their greatest expression in his women characters, among them the bold and autonomous Bathsheba Everdene, next in line for the Jane Austen treatment? Please let the answer be no. But Thomas Vinterberg’s pedantic and twisted adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd is a bad sign. This isn’t a wholly terrible picture. Shot in Dorset, Somerset and Oxfordshire by the Danish-born Charlotte Bruus Christensen, it’s handsome in a dour, brooding way: Hardy territory as viewed by a Scandinavian rather than an Englishman, an odd-couple matchup of sensibilities that’s intriguing by itself.

But this Bathsheba Everdene — a Victorian-era woman who inherits and capably runs a farm, and also rejects the humble man who truly loves her in favor of a shallow but dashing soldier — is all wrong, and it’s hard to know where to lay the blame. Carey Mulligan plays her, but it seems Vinterberg and screenwriter David Nicholls have tweaked the character to underscore her strengths and soften the edges of her weaknesses. As written by Hardy, Bathsheba is bracingly whole and human; here she’s been outlined, and thus circumscribed, by an eager student’s highlighter.

It didn’t have to be this way. Mulligan can be a charming and delicately expressive actress, but here, she too often squinches her face in a self-satisfied smile, and when she comes out with a line like “I have no need of a husband” — a bit of dialogue completely in tune with Hardy’s sensibilities — it sounds less a natural outburst than like something she read in a pamphlet. She’s feisty when she needs to be self-possessed.

Vinterberg’s casting is otherwise sound. Belgium’s Matthias Schoenaerts (The Drop, Rust and Bone) is Gabriel Oak, the shepherd who’s both as sturdy and as capable of turning toward the sun as the tree that shares his name. Schoenaerts’s demeanor — grave, sensitive, watchful — is perfect. You’d trust him with your sheep. He’s especially lovely in a sequence with Michael Sheen’s William Boldwood, the emotionally repressed farmer who becomes infatuated with Bathsheba, only to realize that he has to join the queue. “I feel the most terrible grief,” Boldwood confides, after being toyed with and rejected by the woman he loves but can’t come close to understanding. Sheen’s performance is fine-grained, and the pure Englishness of his understatement is heartrending; Oak responds with a silent but electrified current of masculine sympathy. They’re two guys bummed out about the same woman, but they’re so respectful of her genuinely noble qualities that they refuse to speak ill of her.

Tom Sturridge is too numbly featureless to channel the cruel but sexy Sergeant Troy; they don’t call them wooden soldiers for nothing. Sadly, his performance is perhaps the perfect counterpart to Mulligan’s.

Vinterberg, director of serious-minded workouts like The Hunt and The Celebration, is stalwart. You’d have to be, not just to mount an adaptation of a book as great as this one. No wonder that Far From the Madding Crowd can’t win.