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Far From the Madding Crowd
May. 31st, 2015 09:55 amI was braindead yesterday, just incredibly, incredibly out of it, so finally I drove off to the alternate reality that is the picturesque town of Rhinebeck and spent the day trying on clothes and going to the movies.
I heart Thomas Hardy, so there was no way I was gonna miss the most recent remake of Far From the Madding Crowd even though I suspected it would be awful. (And I was right!)
Far From the Madding Crowd qualifies as Thomas Hardy’s feel-good novel since only 70% of its characters die tragic and humiliating deaths. (Well, more, I suppose, if you count the sheep and Young George, the dog.)
The 1968 movie remains one of my all-time favorite films. Partly because the young Julie Christie has always been my favorite actress – she looked just like Diana Ruston, my first serious girlfriend, and nothing beats the heartbreak of lost Sapphic love when it comes to sheer pathos and intense, frustrated yearning.
Wasn’t just that Julie Christie was so incredibly beautiful. It was also that she was so charismatic. She lit up the screen. The viewer could totally understand the fascination she exercised over the three men who vie for her hand, Alan Bates (Gabriel), Terence Stamp (Troy), and Peter Graves (Boldwood), who were also very good and quite brilliantly cast.
The other reason the 1968 version of Far From the Madding Crowd works, though, is that its screenplay was subtly brilliant.
Hardy was an early feminist. You’d be hard put to find a more complex, intelligent, emotionally compelling character in all of Victorian literature than Jude the Obscure’s Sue Bridehead.
Far From the Madding Crowd’s Bathsheba Everdene is a coquette. But even in inventing Bathsheba, Hardy’s proto-feminism comes into play. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away, Hardy writes. And later, he has Bathsheba remark acerbically to the disappointed Boldwood, “It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language designed by men to express theirs.”
The problem with these lines is that film is essentially a visual medium. And these lines are mouthfuls.
The then young, hip screenwriter Frederic Raphael solved this problem with a genius image at the very end of the movie. And whenever you look up, there I’ll be, the genial Gabriel Oak tells Bathsheba in the last spoken line of the movie. He means it as a smug assertion of affection – but, of course, it’s actually a sentence – life without parole.
The last image of the movie is what Bathsheba sees as she lays in bed with Gabriel. Her eyes light upon a clock. The camera pans in for a close-up of that clock and Bathsheba’s panicked eyes, and the theme music veers ever weirdly off-kilter, letting the viewer know that Bathsheba gets it. Gabriel may be less cruel a jailer than Frank Troy. But he’s no less a jailer.
Really, really brilliant image.
Of course, the revamped Far From the Madding Crowd turns the whole story into a romantic comedy. Which it most decidedly is not.
Plus… Carey Mulligan. Who the fuck is she? Why does she have a career? She’s awful. Plus – and I realize this is terribly mean of me – she has this mole on the corner or her mouth that she really should consider having removed because it looks like a crumb of food, and I kept wanting to crawl up to the screen and wipe it off.
I heart Thomas Hardy, so there was no way I was gonna miss the most recent remake of Far From the Madding Crowd even though I suspected it would be awful. (And I was right!)
Far From the Madding Crowd qualifies as Thomas Hardy’s feel-good novel since only 70% of its characters die tragic and humiliating deaths. (Well, more, I suppose, if you count the sheep and Young George, the dog.)
The 1968 movie remains one of my all-time favorite films. Partly because the young Julie Christie has always been my favorite actress – she looked just like Diana Ruston, my first serious girlfriend, and nothing beats the heartbreak of lost Sapphic love when it comes to sheer pathos and intense, frustrated yearning.
Wasn’t just that Julie Christie was so incredibly beautiful. It was also that she was so charismatic. She lit up the screen. The viewer could totally understand the fascination she exercised over the three men who vie for her hand, Alan Bates (Gabriel), Terence Stamp (Troy), and Peter Graves (Boldwood), who were also very good and quite brilliantly cast.
The other reason the 1968 version of Far From the Madding Crowd works, though, is that its screenplay was subtly brilliant.
Hardy was an early feminist. You’d be hard put to find a more complex, intelligent, emotionally compelling character in all of Victorian literature than Jude the Obscure’s Sue Bridehead.
Far From the Madding Crowd’s Bathsheba Everdene is a coquette. But even in inventing Bathsheba, Hardy’s proto-feminism comes into play. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away, Hardy writes. And later, he has Bathsheba remark acerbically to the disappointed Boldwood, “It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language designed by men to express theirs.”
The problem with these lines is that film is essentially a visual medium. And these lines are mouthfuls.
The then young, hip screenwriter Frederic Raphael solved this problem with a genius image at the very end of the movie. And whenever you look up, there I’ll be, the genial Gabriel Oak tells Bathsheba in the last spoken line of the movie. He means it as a smug assertion of affection – but, of course, it’s actually a sentence – life without parole.
The last image of the movie is what Bathsheba sees as she lays in bed with Gabriel. Her eyes light upon a clock. The camera pans in for a close-up of that clock and Bathsheba’s panicked eyes, and the theme music veers ever weirdly off-kilter, letting the viewer know that Bathsheba gets it. Gabriel may be less cruel a jailer than Frank Troy. But he’s no less a jailer.
Really, really brilliant image.
Of course, the revamped Far From the Madding Crowd turns the whole story into a romantic comedy. Which it most decidedly is not.
Plus… Carey Mulligan. Who the fuck is she? Why does she have a career? She’s awful. Plus – and I realize this is terribly mean of me – she has this mole on the corner or her mouth that she really should consider having removed because it looks like a crumb of food, and I kept wanting to crawl up to the screen and wipe it off.
