But in fact, Vinterberg has come back with something far more conventional: the film is less of a soul-gnawing, Nordically inflected tragedy than a superior Sunday-evening costume drama, or a mini-break in cinema form.
It’s no accident that the opening caption locates the action in “Dorset, England,” rather than Hardy’s own lightly fictionalised county of Wessex. As soon as you leave the cinema, you want to pack a suitcase.
Vinterberg and his director of photography, Charlotte Bruus Christensen, draw out the setting’s raw-boned beauty – even in the brutal early sequence in which the shepherd Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts) watches his entire flock gallop, lemming-like, over the prow of a chalky cliff. As Gabriel surveys their bodies on the beach below, his life’s work lost with a shrug of nature’s shoulders, the rising sun makes the air as bright and sweet as banana milk.
The main snag in adapting Far from the Madding Crowd is that it has already been done three times, and once perfectly, by John Schlesinger in 1967 (read our review here). Schlesinger’s film, which starred Julie Christie and Terence Stamp, revelled in the details of rural life – its songs, rhythms and rituals – and sunk you up to the elbows in the community it depicted. But in Vinterberg’s version, the characters are lonelier, more isolated: like prospectors in a western, they’re specks on a hostile landscape.
When we first see Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan), she’s standing by her horse in a darkened stable, preparing for the ride of her life. She’s inherited a large farm from her uncle and must relocate there at once, much to the disappointment of Gabriel, who had hoped to make her the mistress of his own, far humbler, estate.
Mulligan is on typically excellent form here. Her Bathsheba is every bit as much a Hardy heroine for our times as Christie’s was for the late Sixties, more reflective and less flighty than the earlier version, but also earnest to a fault.
Unfortunately, her male co-stars can’t quite match her pace, although that mostly comes down to the script, which does away with a handful of vital, character-shaping scenes in order to cram the plot into a commercially friendly two-hour running time (Schlesinger’s version was 50 minutes longer).
The scriptwriter is David Nicholls, who coped better fitting Tess of the D’Urbervilles into four hour-long episodes for the BBC in 2008. The main casualties are Juno Temple’s Fanny Robin, a character reduced to her barest bones, and Tom Sturridge’s Frank Troy, the roguish sergeant immortalised by Terence Stamp in the 1967 film who steals Bathsheba’s heart against her better judgment.