Film Review: Carey Mulligan stars in 'Madding Crowd'

I'm a little behind on my Thomas Hardy, so I didn't know the heroine in Far From the Madding Crowd is named Bathsheba Everdene.

Thus, I did not realize she is surely the inspiration for Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, also a resourceful country girl with multiple suitors.

And can there be any doubt Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins - who calls her bread-baking character Peeta - also borrows Hardy's affinity for overripe names?

In Far From the Madding Crowd, Everdene (Carey Mulligan) is romanced by a farmer named Oak and a soldier named Troy. She has a wealthy suitor, too, and he is miraculously not named Mr. Sterling, Mr. Rich, or Mr. Gold.

Whom will she choose?

In this version (the story was last filmed in 1967, with Julie Christie), it's a secondary question, at best.

The focus is on Everdene's winsome independence. The best scenes in Madding Crowd show Everdene making her way in a man's world. She is a young woman of modest means and upbringing who inherits a country estate and is determined to run it with toughness and equanimity.

That she does, firing malingerers, rewarding competent workers, negotiating shrewdly with competitors, turning a declining agricultural concern into a thriving and happy enterprise.

This, in Madding Crowd, is improbably thrilling, perhaps because for all of the story's Old World backwardness, it is a distressingly rare thing in our purportedly more evolved cinema to see a confident, industrious woman succeed in this particular way.

Everdene's grit also puts Mulligan in her best light. She plays Bathsheba with wit and humor and makes the character's shrewdness and self-reliance irresistibly attractive.

"I promise to astonish you all," she says to a dubious staff, and she does. Mulligan even gets to sing, which she's done so memorably in Shame and Inside Llewyn Davis.

No wonder the men in Madding Crowd fall for her and stammer out their clumsy affections. Farmer Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts) initially offers livestock; her wealthy suitor (Michael Sheen), a real estate deal.

Everdene is unmoved until the dashing Sgt. Troy (Tom Sturridge) appears and sets her heart to racing. She loses her composure, and so does director Thomas Vinterberg, staging a scene in which Troy unsheaths his sword and waves it in Everdene's face - a prelude to a mad interlude of passion.

Mulligan seems less comfortable having her bodice ripped, particularly by this transparent bounder, whose proto-Ron Burgundy mustache looks like an artifact from a Monty Python skit.

The other men are fine - Sheen as the wounded, older bachelor, and especially Schoenaerts as the sturdy Oak.

Far From the Madding Crowd is stately, handsome, appealingly old-fashioned, and Schoenaerts, with his quiet, broad-shouldered presence and unforced masculinity, is the perfect fellow to hoe this particular row.

Directed by Thomas Vinterberg. With Carey Mulligan, Michael Sheen, Tom Sturridge, Matthias Schoenaerts. Distributed by 20th Century Fox.

Running time: 1 hour, 59 mins.

Parent's guide: PG-13 (some sexuality and violence).

Playing at: Ritz Five and Bryn Mawr Film Institute.

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