These lifeless lumps on the shimmering beach below make for a beautifully grim image, and Vinterberg’s cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen plays with unnatural light in dark places to capture the magic and reality in this Victorian England period piece. Perhaps the film’s most memorable scene is early on, when all of Oak’s sheep are chased off the edge of a cliff by his farm dog. Vinterberg, who last directed the stellar The Hunt and was one of the founders of the Dogme 95 movement, finds the best notes in Hardy’s story when he plays up its dark edges. Far From the Madding Crowd is a story about a woman’s choices and independence and how those qualities determine love, and if anything it’s a shame to see this more predictable third man stand in counter to the film’s feminist statements. Gabriel Oaks observes Bathsheba Everdene, the young mistress of Weatherbury Farm, fall victim to bad decisions and romantic impulses, unaware of the stroke of.
She meant it as a joke, only to have the handsome man in uniform Sergeant Francis Troy (Tom Sturridge) emerge as a more dominant presence in her life. She then sends a valentine to her wealthy but stuffy neighbor William Boldwood (Michael Sheen), and enters into a love triangle when he too proposes marriage. Mulligan finds her voice and authority with this character with ease, but things pick up when she then hires Oak as her new shepherd after he’s displaced from his farm, constantly confiding in him but keeping his subdued advances at arms’ length. She even negotiates a deal at the market among a bunch of men in black, all shocked to see a woman dressed in pink. She asserts her authority as the farm’s new “mistress,” not master. Bathsheba is soon granted a bountiful inheritance and takes over the Everdene barley and wheat estate.
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