Months ago, I celebrated the rerelease of John Schlesinger’s fervidly epic 1967 version; now, Thomas Vinterberg’s take on Far from the Madding Crowd (Fox, 12) doesn’t quite weather the immediate comparison. To be fair, not many respectable corset dramas would. Vinterberg’s comparatively compressed adaptation is a restrained, russet, handsome thing; it honours the circumspect romanticism of Thomas Hardy’s novel, if not all the storied complications thereof.
What it lacks is any wildness in its turns of heart, or that of its independently reckless heroine: Carey Mulligan offers an attentive, serious-minded reading of Bathsheba Everdene, but hardly projects the aura of a woman animated by desire. As for Bathsheba’s men, Matthias Schoenaerts soulfully captures the sturdy, of-the-earth demeanour of Gabriel Oak, while Michael Sheen’s Boldwood is a piercingly quiet study in profound internal bruising; it may be his best work on film. Only Tom Sturridge, overly starched and unalluring as Sergeant Troy, misses the mark. It’s hard to determine how Bathsheba might fall for him, though in Vinterberg’s film, it’s hard to determine how she might fall at all.
Allowing for a slight Teutonic clip to her delivery, Nina Hoss might have made one hell of a Bathsheba Everdene a decade ago, and not just because she’s one hell of an actress. She’s shiveringly immaculate in Phoenix (Soda, 12), her latest team-up with German auteur Christian Petzold: together, they have one of the most intuitive, mutually inquisitive director-star collaborations going in contemporary cinema. It says much for their joint oeuvre that Phoenix isn’t their finest hour, for it’s still a very fine hour (and 38 minutes) indeed.
A post-first world war elegy for lives and loves lost rendered in saturated symbolic strokes of high melodrama, it depends for its hefty emotional effect on equally substantial suspension of disbelief. In bombed-out Berlin, Hoss’s former cabaret singer is forced to impersonate herself for the rediscovered husband from whom the Holocaust separated her; convinced she is someone else following facial reconstruction surgery, he moulds her into the near-spitting image of the woman she was. This is the extravagantly daft stuff of vintage Hollywood psychodrama, plushly carpeted in Vertigo allusions. Petzold has the visual and sensual nous to support them, even as the plotting piles up to an abrupt, prosaic conclusion. And Hoss is a marvel, playing a performer separated into so many semblances of self that the real one is lost in the shuffle.
Unfairly mismarketed as Reese Witherspoon’s version of The Blind Side, Philippe Falardeau’s The Good Lie (Entertainment One, 12) takes the “better than it looks” prize for the week: fears that this true story of Sudanese rufugees in Kansas will be derailed into white-saviour territory by Witherspoon’s feisty southern employment counsellor prove pleasantly unfounded. The actress is on good, tart form, but happy to be a secondary player: Falardeau focuses with generous humour (and a lick of human-interest sentimentality) on the immigrants’ story, with modest but moving results.
Chris Rock would surely mock its mild racial politics, but his own Top Five (Paramount, 15) occasionally finds the firebrand comic pulling his punches: a rambling, discursive, sometimes squawkingly funny showbiz satire, it finds a bridge-burning comedian (Rock, obviously) seeking artistic redemption with a turgid black-history epic. In a sense, this is Rock’s own nervous stab at rehabilitative seriousness, even if it’s peppered with hit-and-miss jokes about celebrity vacuity, sexuality and racial perception.
Another week, another solid original drama series from Netflix. Their Spanish-language latest, Narcos, doesn’t quite have the individual pop of Orange Is the New Black or House of Cards, but its sample episodes promise a lean, unfussily compelling account of Colombian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar’s rise to power. Directed by José Padilha (Elite Squad), it’s not an unfamiliar drug-war saga, but it’s one as interested in the fraught political landscape that enabled Escobar’s dominance as it is in the man himself, played with refreshingly low-key menace by Brazilian star Wagner Moura. We all know where it ends, of course, but getting there should be gripping.
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