• Far From the Madding Crowd

The novel it's based on may be a century-and-a-half old, and it opens with a mad-sheepdog accident, of all the crazy, rural old-fashioned things, but this new cinematic adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd is more modern, more progressive, and just plain more grown-up than half the movies thrown at us in our stodgy, convention-bound multiplex movie landscape. And it doesn't always convey modernity in positive ways. The challenges faced by its female protagonist as she navigates a man's professional realm—and the assholery she encounters as she navigates a woman's romantic options—are barely distinguishable from what women are still putting up with today.

I haven't read Hardy's book since high school, and I remember so little of it that the plot twists here came as surprises, so it's possible that screenwriter David Nicholls (the 2012 adaptation of Great Expectations) and director Thomas Vinterberg (The Hunt) have fudged some of the details a little to make their film more relevant to contemporary audiences. If so, that's OK. It's great, in fact. The bones of the story remain the same, and this was the same Bathsheba Everdene who was smart, brave, and independent enough to inspire Suzanne Collins to name her Hunger Games protagonist after her.

Here, Bathsheba is a marvelously free spirit embodied with verve and passion and steely courage by Carey Mulligan. She races her horse across the moors of Wessex—Hardy's fictionalization of the rural English county of Dorset—riding astraddle in a most unladylike, yet most practical, manner. She wears a cool leather jacket and "intend[s] to astonish" the workers at her uncle's farming estate, which she has just inherited and will run as if she were a man, even though it is the female-unfriendly Victorian 1870s. She is positively dripping in handsome suitors: Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts), a shepherd on her farm; William Boldwood (Michael Sheen), the wealthy landowner next door; and Sergeant Francis Troy (Tom Sturridge), whose rakish mustache, red uniform and swordplay skills would make Lydia Bennet swoon.

Although Bathsheba says things like, "I'm too independent" when turning down proposals of marriage, and that she wants a husband who will "tame" her, it's pretty clear that she doesn't really want any husband at all. At least, she certainly doesn't want one under the Victorian understanding of what a woman could expect from a marriage: to be subjugated to her husband, to be required to defer to him in all things. She wants an equal partner in her life and her business. She cannot be wooed by offering her presents—you cannot buy or bribe a woman who has her own money and resources—and perhaps she can afford to be silly in her choice, and choose the man she wants, rather than the one who would make the most advantageous match. She can make her decision out of desire, and not out of pragmatic need.

Bathsheba isn't perfect, which is what makes her so intriguing. She makes some stupid mistakes—some out of stubborn pride, some of out of boneheaded thoughtlessness. But everything she does (or doesn't do) is a consequence of the work that she loves—running the estate—being her life; any romantic entanglements will necessarily impact that work, and have to become part of it. Which is awesome. Women's lives are complicated! This is more than most movies today are interested in dealing with, or even acknowledging.

But this truly isn't a message film. It's a ridiculously romantic one, in all the best ways—from the gorgeous landscapes, to the sweeping emotions, to the soap-opera-ish melodrama. It's fun, and it's sexy in a way that most movies nowadays can't be bothered with. The primary physical intimacy here is a super-sexy kiss at the end, when Bathsheba finally ends up with the Right Guy, and it proves to be hotter than anything I've seen onscreen in ages. Sexy here isn't naked bodies, but bared hearts.

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD