Our Sunday Corner with Lee Liberman -- Thomas Hardy: Far From the Madding Crowd, streaming on HBO

According to novelist Thomas Hardy, there were always badly matched marriage partners, thwarted happiness, and suffering in lovely rural Wessex, (a fictional county in South West England) because Victorian society was that stifling. Hardy (1840-1928) used his rural tales to show the tragic effects that social constraints had on individuals especially regarding marriage and social mobility.

The dictionary defines "madding" as 'frenzied' or 'maddening'. Thus the title infers a rural setting layered with generations who have worked the land (sowing, harvesting, lambing, bee-hiving, etc.) may seem immune from the impurities of city life; but no, making the opposite point to Tolstoy's in Anna Karenina, life in the sticks was as perverse and misery-making as life in the city. The novel of Bathsheba Everdene and her 3 suitors was disconcerting in the day (1874) -- saturated as it was with modern erotic overtones and misery, leading to Hardy's ironic title. However, this tale, unlike Hardy novels to follow, does offer up a conventional happy ending. If this is your one shot at Hardy, enjoy, but for comparison, see the film of Hardy's Woodlanders (1997) with Rufus Sewell streaming on Netflix.

Thomas Vinterberg (above) emerged as a Danish film director: a handsome "precocious, brilliant brat," wrote Guardian reviewer, Andrew Pulver. His bad boy period followed years of youth spent in a middle-class commune, including several films more preoccupied with form than content -- they flopped. Says Vinterberg, "I found I am not an anarchistic form creator; I'm intuitive and I'm trying to figure out a way to explore human frailty." Subsequently his film The Hunt (2012) with Mads Mikkelsen was Academy-Awards nominated Best Foreign Language Film. Now comes "Madding"(2015), a workmanlike production that checks the director box for 'historical fiction', if a somewhat thin effort regarding Hardy's message. The film ploughs and slices through the novel's plot points without lingering on frailty of character, despite Vinterberg having staked out this territory in his own words and it's being material to the novel. But once you see the film, you will know backwards and forwards "what happens" in Hardy's famous work; have savored its sumptuous landscape; and found the piece enjoyable, whatever the critics say.

Vinterberg follows others, notably John Schlesinger, who directed a 3-hour version of the novel in 1967. Critics faulted Schlesinger for not conveying the paralyzing social constraints of the Victorians and for Julie Christie's Bathsheba played as an ethereal feminine archetype which Hardy's Bathsheba certainly was not; but otherwise Schlesinger is said to have better delivered on the psychological overtones than Vinterberg. Carey Mulligan's Bathsheba (above and below), however, is just right -- a sturdy young modern driven by her own will and sense (often naive) of being able to shape her own destiny -- decisively her own mistress and manager of her employees. She masters the business of her estate, impulsively marries the wrong guy, and then gets a do-over. Not bad, except for the tragedy left in her wake. Mulligan glows; she is very much up to the task of Bathsheba Everdene.

The plot in brief: A poor, if well-educated Miss Everdene inherits her uncle's estate and is determined to run it herself, including joining in farm labor. She juggles three earnest suitors -- the reticent if solid farmer Gabriel Oak played by the broad-shouldered Belgian, Matthias Schoenaerts (Rust and Bone, The Danish Girl, currently on screen in sizzler A Bigger Splash); wealthy neighbor Mr Boldwood played with painful self-abnegation by Michael Sheen, a stage and film actor of ingenious and resourceful talent (Masters of Sex), and Frank Troy, the narcissist, played by Tom Sturridge (On the Road, Effie Gray) as a brash, nasty piece of work for whom you squeeze out half an ounce of sympathy anyway. He has impregnated farm girl, Fanny, (Juno Temple), whose life is ruined, her tragedy threading sorrow through the story.

Hardy used some names intentionally. His Gabriel (not only having the surname 'Oak') means 'God's able bodied man'. Bathsheba, like Bathsheba of the Bible, is an object of desire who unwittingly causes death or disaster. A 'dene' is a deeply wooded gorge; thus 'Bathsheba Everdene' represents sex and destructive power set lushly in nature. And she surely played Helen to Sturridge's Troy.

Bathsheba herself hasn't a mean bone in her body; it's just that her strong sense of self stirs up and muddles the conventional expectations around her. Mr. Boldwood (below) says "Miss Everdene, I want very much, more than ANYTHING, to have you as my wife", but Bathsheba will be had by no one (until Troy seduces her, above). Vinterberg does not let us in on Mr. Boldwood's growing lapse into fantasy, pretending she will be his wife. We get a glimpse of his accumulated 'Bathsheba Boldwood' collection of jewels and clothing but nothing of his obsessive behavior. Michael Sheen makes brilliant use of bits of script to convey Boldwood's misery, he breaks your heart in just a few passages, but there is simply not enough story line there to help us imagine his progression from bereaved to demented.

Many a woman will recognize the art of the con in Francis Troy's first invasive stare at Bathsheba. (Hardy tells us Troy 'lied like a cretin' to women.) Just stare and tell a woman she is the most beautiful creature ever seen -- it works. Bathsheba melts into mush. From what we see of her responses to Oak and Boldwood's advances, Bathsheba's rapid seduction by the sociopathic Troy takes her (and us) off guard. She abandons her autonomy and 'what is right' in a mere moment. This shirker doesn't deserve a minute more time in our face, but it would have helped to linger a bit on Bathsheba's bedazzlement (a lesson to all women).

Matthias Schoenaerts' reliable sheep farmer gives nothing away. Whatever pain and disappointment he endures at Bathsheba's rejection, he gets the force of her independence but neither love nor pain ever shows in his eyes. Schoenaerts could have leaked something through those windows, though Gabriel Oak is otherwise endearing and his sensible counsel and actions form the backbone of the story. (Below he teaches her how to sharpen tools.)

Oak warns her about Troy, otherwise staying aloof and stoic while his rivals play out their hands, but supports her through crisis and chaos. At last, having been burned by love, Bathsheba finally knows his value to her, providing the slightly upbeat ending for a Hardy novel (though not upbeat for the several characters whose ending was quite terrible).

I have implicitly faulted Vinterberg for not letting us in quite enough on the harshness of the emotional lives of Hardy's characters; most of the information is there but the chop chop of events needs to slow so the heady emotion in the story can breathe enough for us to absorb it. Nonetheless, this is a lovely work that offers its pleasures, and Vinterberg has checked off 'period film' on his CV with enough dignity to move on -- or perhaps absorb a backward move. His next film The Commune, is based on his own childhood experience.

The above post was written by 

our monthly correspondent, Lee Liberman

Michael Winterbottom's India-set, Hardy-inspired TRISHNA gives Pinto a plum role

Best not to make too much of the fact that TRISHNA -- the latest endeavor from British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom -- is based on the Thomas Hardy novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles. It's been more than fifty years since I've read that book (as a high-school student, I read it too soon) and over two decades since seeing the earlier filmed version from Polanski. Because that version ran over three hours, it was able to be more faithful (but not nearly enough) to Hardy's work; it would take an eight-hour miniseries, done well, to do the novel justice (this four-hour version starring Gemma Arterton and Eddie Redmayne may come closer to the mark).

No matter: Hardy's theme -- how class, together with the place of women in society, affects our lives -- travels, it turns out, quite well to the sub-continent. (Just as England was going through major economic and social change at the end of the 19th Century, India is going through its own version currently.) Who better than a Brit to explore all this in a country his own country colonized, to the former's detriment on many levels. (And betterment on a few? Surely the effects of this colonization cannot have been entirely negative?) Class struggle and the genuine empowerment of women were and are still necessary in England, just as they remain needed pretty much all over the globe, and Winterbottom (shown above) grabs and runs with this idea, weaving it into his story with strong threads. Thomas Hardy himself is the only writer credited to the film on its IMDB site, but this seems disingenuous; this long-dead titan certainly did not write the dialog we hear, which according to an interview/review in the Village Voice, the actors often improvised from a draft that Winterbottom himself had written.

For me, Trishna (the character and the movie itself) succeeds mightily in its endeavor to bring these themes artfully to life. And it does so on the back (and the gorgeous face) of the beautiful and graceful actress, Freida Pinto, who here has her best role so far. After her debut in the over-rated Slumdog Millionaire; her lovely, brief stint in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger; her work-to-no-avail in (and as) the tiresome Miral; a pointless role in the tiresome-in-another-manner Immortals; and despite even her satisfactory work as the necessary woman in the terrific but practically all-male blockbuster Rise of the Planet of the Apes -- finally, a filmmaker has made glorious use of this extraordinarily delicate and subdued performer, shown above and below.

Ms Pinto is rather a passive actress, whose great beauty never needs pushing. In the role of Trishna, an Indian country girl of poor parents who attracts the eye of the wealthy British-educated son (Riz Ahmed, below) of an Indian entrepreneur (Roshan Seth), with Winterbottom's help, she uses this passivity to remarkable effect. It becomes, finally, a kind of passionate strength.

Ahmed, after a few turns ranging from startling to impressive in films like The Road to Guantanamo, Rage, Four Lions and Centurion, also has a role that should goose him further into leading man status. He has buffed up some in the interim and proves very sexy here. Initially, he appears to care for Trishna, yet his character, as much as hers, is trapped in India's own cultural/societal class-conscious slavery. Because he has never had to work, to test himself, to actually fend for himself, he's weak in a manner than Trishna could never be. And yet, she knows her place, just as he knows his.

What eventually happens is as shocking as it is believable, and Ms Pinto rises to the awful occasion in a manner that's just about perfect: still somehow passive, even in an act that seems anything but. Having cast his film so well, using both professionals and real people who simply play the roles they do in their day job, Winter-bottom also allows them to improvise some of their dialog. The result, whether it's in the posh hotel where Trishna begins her "career" or the Bollywood dance class she joins and proves good at, carries a sense of reality that something like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel can't come near (and probably wouldn't want to).

Trishna, 108 minutes, from IFC FIlms, opens today, Friday, July 13, in New York City at the IFC Center and the Lincoln Plaza Cinema.  It will open in the Los Angeles area later this month at several of the Laemmle locations. For couch potatoes, it begins its IFC VOD run next week on Friday, July 20.