Far From the Madding Crowd

When Danish director Thomas Vinterberg — director of The Celebration, Dear Wendy The Hunt, etc. — undertook a mainstream film he did well to alight on Thomas Hardy. Both artists focus on the fragility of the social structure, family relationships, even the individual psyche. 

The early hymn is Blake’s “Jerusalem,” of “England’s green and pleasant land,” an effulgence borne out in the film’s landscapes, with its plush harvests and rich fields. But that rich nature is a taunting antithesis to — not the Romantic reflection of — the human condition. Vinterberg’s and Hardy’s nature has no sympathy for human suffering, for dashed hopes and romantic dreams. People and relationships are broken while nature continues unperturbed and uncaring.

Of Bathsheba’s three suitors the two good men are connected to nature, the hands-on Gabriel Oak and the wealthy estate owner and gentleman William Boldwood. Unlike Hardy’s insentient nature, both men want to protect Bathsheba. Boldwood says it and Oak does it. Unlike the generous Oak, Boldwood wants to possess Bathsheba. He's content to have her even if she doesn't love him. He buys a private collection of clothes and jewelry dedicated to her, as if already possessing her, and he assumes she will accept him.

The dangerous soldier Troy evokes classical fiction and the literary rascal type. When he weeps at his first bride’s apparent abandonment — as at his real loss later — he begins with our sympathy until he dwindles to literary type, the irresponsible, carousing, gambling soldier. After Bathsheba spurns the solid suitors — Oak of the earth and Boldwood of economic security — she falls for the thrill of risk. She’s won by the danger of Troy’s swordplay, which seems dashing in Fern Hollow but silly in her farmyard. There he fences emptily with the cow Bathsheba milked.

But Troy gives her the taming she initially told Oak she wanted. After that proves to be false she accepts Oak’s more civilized training, when he makes her come after him with a civil request to return to save her sheep, then finally to pursue him to wed. Having prided herself in her independence she finds her most substantial relationship in a man upon whom she can depend. Hardy’s fundamental feminism appears in his great line about the difficulty women have expressing their feelings in a language men have developed to express their own.

The story abounds with disastrous accidents. Four lives are ruined when a bride goes to the wrong church —in the country yet, far from the madding crowd. Oak is secure and affluent until his independent sheepdog runs amok at night and chases the entire herd off a cliff, ruining him. As Young George descends from reliable Old George there is no more security in bloodlines than in a solider’s uniform. Young George’s lack of discipline makes him a negative reflection of Bathsheba’s independence and self-assertion, in the face of Victorian convention. The most civilized man, Boldwood, is drawn back into human and social relationships only to go crazy and kill Troy.

Troy himself seems accidentally — or providentially — risen from the dead. Nature erupts destructively in the fire, the dangerous rainstorm and when the vast sea spits Troy back to some fishermen. A nature that doesn’t care for man confirms the helplessness of the human condition.