Darcy swimming at Pembroke, a wonderful scene that does not occur in the novel Pride and Prejudice but that few Austen fans would care to see removed from the BBC’s 1995 adaptation. It is easy enough to play around with the filming of a dinner party or estate ramble, as, for example, when Elizabeth Bennett catches Mr. The problem for the creative filmmaker is that these scenes tend to be quite specific and require a considerable amount of explanation for those not well acquainted with Victorian farming techniques. Thus where James fills his novel with dinners and parties and teas and digestive walks, Hardy fills his with scenes of agricultural labor.
Rural life, in all its forms, lived many miles and accents and classes away from the “Madding Crowd” of busy London. Hardy, though he and his characters indulge with just as much gusto in the masculine gaze, does not intend for Bathsheba to be the sole center of his novel. James maintains a firm focus on human society, human interiority, human psychology - specifically the inner life of his “Lady,” Isabel Archer, whose representation is crucial enough to require the whole of the novel’s title. And the hay, the rain, the grain, and the honeybees. In both novels, the heroine’s continuous indecision (and eventual disastrous decision) makes for a compelling drama, dense with dramatic irony.īut there is a key difference between James’s novel and Hardy’s, one crucial for filmmaking, and it involves the sheep and dogs. A bright, beautiful, ferociously independent young woman fends off marriage proposals from two appealing men who offer to raise her social and economic status instead, after inheriting a dazzling pile of property, she accepts the hand of a vile man who requires her to support him. He deleted the sheep and dogs and clothed his humans more fashionably, but the bones of the story are the same. James may have despised the rustic, exaggerated humans of Far From the Madding Crowd, but quickly after panning the book he stole its human plot for The Portrait of a Lady (1881). More on the sheep and the dogs in a moment. Agitated, perhaps, by the novel’s inexhaustible action, Henry James famously complained that “everything human in the book strikes us as factitious and insubstantial the only things we believe in are the sheep and the dogs.”
Every time she twitches, the novel quakes with great drama. Hardy packs a fallen woman tale, an untimely death, a mysterious disappearance, and a feminist bildungsroman into a central romance in which not two but three suitors - the shepherd Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts), the farmer William Boldwood (Michael Sheen), and the soldier Frank Troy (Tom Sturridge) - compete for the hand of Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan), that wonderfully vexing, eternally modern creation for whom the phrase “fiercely independent” must have been invented. In fairness to Vinterberg, Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd is crowded with so much confounding, brilliant, baroquely intricate action that to remove a single element from a retelling risks toppling the whole story. Thomas Vinterberg’s recent adaptation almost always opts for the latter technique, and the result is a film that is completely dutiful, very attractive, and mostly dull. ADAPTING A NOVEL with a plot as unwieldy as that of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) for the screen requires compromise: the film must either remove a number of scenes that appear in the novel or squeeze as many scenes as possible into a watchable span of time.
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