Far from the Madding Crowd – does the film live up to Hardy's novel?

Far from the Madding Crowd might be Hardy’s sunniest novel, but it is also subversive and unsettling. Thomas Vinterberg’s new film adaptation creates a Bathsheba for the modern audience, but does it capture the book’s strangeness and erotic energy?

Far from the Madding Crowd has been called the “warmest and sunniest” of Thomas Hardy’s novels. In contrast to the inexorable tragedy of Tess of the D’Urbervilles or the nihilistic horror of Jude the Obscure, it indeed has a conventional happy ending. The narrative follows the fortunes of the spirited “woman-farmer” Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors: the sturdy, steady shepherd Gabriel Oak; Sergeant Troy, a dangerous Don Juan in uniform; and the repressed gentleman farmer William Boldwood. Gabriel is ultimately rewarded for his constancy, and the book ends with his wedding to Bathsheba.

However, the plot also contains elements which are far from warm or sunny: murder, insanity, a macabre coffin-opening scene featuring the corpses of a mother and her baby, life-threatening elemental eruptions of fire and thunderstorm, numerous violent animal deaths, and sexual symbolism so brazen that it can only have been intended to cock a snook at Victorian prudery.

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