Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.
Aedonerre I gave this film a 9 out of 10, because it was exactly what I expected it to be.
Walter Sloane Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.
CountZero313 Winterbottom keeps the temperature of the searing original novel in his faithful, brilliantly realised film adaptation. Hardy was sick when writing Jude, out of sorts, and the bleak tale has in some quarters been credited more to bile than his muse. Jude's fate is certainly more damning than other Hardy heroes such as Tess, and the final third of this tale requires a strong heart to get through.Jude Fawley is a self-educated stonemason looking to enter the hallowed halls of (a thinly-disguised) Oxford. Class and snobbery combine to crush that dream, but he fights and wins his other dream, to secure the love of his cousin Sue. Headstrong and independent, a prototype Suffragette, she will face her own stern test and be found wanting.Christopher Eccleston inhabits the character fully. The scene in the pub where he recites the Lord's Creed in Latin, then challenges the undergrads to judge if he got it right, is painful and poignant. Winslet is stunning as the irable but infuriating Sue Brideshead whose choices in life are oblique but all-too-real. A cold draft of air oozes from her expression every time she shuns Jude. There isn't a missed beat in Winslet's portrayal of a woman who goes from supremely confident to utterly lost.Winterbottom would go on to tinker and experiment, unsuccessfully, with Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge in The Claim. Here, he keeps it strictly BBC, evoking the early industrial age magnificently in his cobbled streets and fog-shrouded spires. An array of British acting talent fill out the ing roles superbly, most notably Liam Cunningham as the put-upon Phillotson, and Rachel Griffiths as pig-hugging Arabella, whose rising fortune sways in counter-point to Jude's slow, inexorable decline. In one scene where she encounters her estranged son at a fairground, the interaction between woman and child is both naturalistic and magical. The expression on the face of Little Jude's sister is priceless. Perhaps a happy accident, perhaps genius from the director, but all the more tragic for what follows.One of the most ill-fated couples in British literature are vividly brought to life in this film, designed to satisfy fans of the novel. Hardy, one feels, would approve.
Framescourer A briskly but sensitively shot, well-acted and brutally rendered version of Thomas Hardy's tragic novel. I being terribly disappointed though (when I saw this in the cinema) that the grainy, visceral b&w images of the title sequence were discontinued as the movie proper got started.Ecclestone finds a great deal of sympathy and charm with which to play the ambitious but unlucky Jude. Kate Winslet is an arguably bigger draw though, throwing herself headlong into a part that requires... well many of the characteristics that she brought to the successful Austen adaptation Sense and Sensibility the previous year: willfulness, joy and despair. Rachel Griffiths is horrible as Jude's ball and chain but nothing is as nasty as the notorious fate of the incestuous couple's children. Strong stuff from Winterbottom, as usual. 6/10
IridescentTranquility How to summarise Jude? They say that in the late Victorian era there was a school of thought that almost glorified the state of childhood, believing it to be a perfect time in a person's life when innocence reigned, but I don't believe Thomas Hardy followed this line of thinking. No matter how young, both Jude the father and Jude the son seem weighed down by doom and misery in this film.I think this film fell under the category of "independent film", which is just as well. Following the Thomas Hardy convention whereby nothing can end happily, Jude ultimately ends with a miserable mood, but in a sense this is perfect. Although it's not the sort of film anyone would want to watch on a "down" day, I'm sure that - had this film been given the Hollywood treatment, the storyline would have been mercilessly rearranged to have a loving happy ending. The problem is, if that happened, it wouldn't be Hardy.There is something stark about the opening of the film - the scratchy music, the loneliness of the solitary young Jude, the clattering noise of the bird-scarer and yet, combined with the black-and-white filming, it evokes the appropriate mood for the film so easily and so early on. In amongst the winter scenes and the aerial shots that show only a tiny bit of movement in an otherwise still landscape, Jude and Arabella's wedding is possibly the busiest, most colourful scene in the whole film. Of course, there are also many interesting social and sometimes political issues raised, partly because of the time in which the film is set. Had the story been moved forward a hundred years, there would be nothing remarkable about Sue attending lectures, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer in the pub, visiting Jude without a chaperone. There would be nothing surprising about being educated when you had a job - like Jude's - that didn't require it. But Jude and Sue are tragic in a way - both impulsive people in a world and a time when a commitment like marriage was not to be taken lightly.There are many bad omens in the film - Aunt Drusilla remarking that "The Fawleys were not meant for marrying" - and the particular tragedy of Jude's character is the way he rushes into things only to regret them later. Though Jude is tragic, his cousin and partner Sue is equally blighted - to watch her change during the film from an irreverent, sparky, impertinent, independent single woman into a tortured, guilty (in her own eyes) shadow of her former self is heartbreaking. Although in some ways women's lives and opportunities were limited in various ways in the nineteenth century, as a female with a job, no husband and no parents or other family, she did have quite a lot of freedom. Oddly, Jude's wife Arabella is not so different from Sue - she is as forward and daring physically as Sue is intellectually. During their marriage, she and Jude almost reverse roles - she goes out to kill a pig single-handedly when he is too sensitive to do so. There is an interesting contrast between Jude's sex scenes with Arabella and the one he has with Sue. The wedding night with Arabella is warmly lit and cosy, whereas the scene with Sue is stark, almost grey, with a cold feeling and yet in some ways Sue and Jude are more necessary to each other than Arabella and Jude ever were. On the costume side I note that - as with the more recent Kate Winslet film Finding Neverland - the costumes don't look like fashion plates, they look like real clothes (occasionally none too clean but when you take into how time-consuming and labour-intensive it must have been to wash them, it's hardly surprising). It seems strange now that Kate must only have been twenty or twenty-one when this film was made - in her first scene she looks mature whereas in others she seems very, very young.This isn't the easiest film to watch - there are a few sections I almost always fast-forward - but that is not to say it's not good. Every time I watch it, a bit of me wants things to end happily, but - as I said before - that just wouldn't be Hardy.
spambouk1000 This film tells the story of a boy who from his childhood dreamed of becoming more. He hopes to leave the brutal rural world of pig-slaughtering and rolls in the hay for the intellectual world of the university, which to him represents the freedom to think one's own thoughts and to live one's own life.Sadly, his conduct and, more importantly, his opportunities cannot bear his aspirations. When faced with a "pregnant" girlfriend, he marries her, as any "good" man should. When faced with mockery from wealthy undergraduates (a scene all the more odd because it pits two Doctor Who's against each other), Jude tries to prove his intelligence by reciting Latin in a pub, realizing in the end that no matter how much Latin he studies he will always be a laborer to these people. He becomes infatuated by his free-thinking cousin, Sue Bridehead, who is similarly pursuing education and independence and who also rejects Victorian conventionalities about women belonging in the home.Sadly, the two cousins find that they cannot reject the values of their world without dire consequences, for them and for their children.Happily, this film beautifully depicts Sue and Jude's struggles in gorgeous shots of the landscape and rich images of the two leads. Christopher Eccleston gives Jude a warm humanity and Kate Winslet creates a Sue Bridehead whom we easily believe could both rebel against social custom and also be crushed by it. I particularly liked the depiction of the harshness of Victorian life: the working in the rain, the beatings, the cruelty to animals, the pain of childbirth, the lack of privacy endured by poor families. The film is not Masterpiece Theatre (no criticism just a comment on style) and shows us clearly what the university means to Jude and just what he is trying to escape.If you liked "The Remains of the Day," "The Age of Innocence," "Tess" or "The Idiot" (book, I've never seen a film of this), you will appreciate this film and the book, as well.
