Jude

I started watching this movie after having read the viewers' comments, so I was prepared for the depression inducing effect everyone kept talking about. Seems like you are never prepared enough for this movie. Sadness and tragedy are in the air right from beginning, you can feel them all the time, even when things start getting better for the two protagonists you know it can't last...because they are doomed, losers, not meant to be happy together. And yet the love they share is the purest and most devoting love I have ever seen on screen; it stunned me how true Jude was to Sue, and how brave Sue was, accepting Jude jr. as one of her own, no questions asked. Many people might find the scene of Sue giving birth and being watched by Jude jr. disturbing, yet it is essential to understand his later deeds, at least partly. The climax of the tragedy is so emotional and so immensely cruel it rips your heart out. I felt the theatre was falling into pieces and so were we, watching this emotional tornado, weeping like possessed. The experience of this movie will make you ponder life, love and death, it will make you understand how important it is to teach your children well and never make them feel undesired. It will make you realize how important it is to always think twice before commiting yourself, even in the modern world flooded with divorces. It will show you what it means to really love, completely and uncompromisingly. I highly recommend this masterpiece, a tale of two beautiful, unfortunate heros ahead their time, doomed by cruelest fate imaginable. 10/10

Set in late 1800's Britain, "Jude" traces the life of the title character (Eccleston), a learned but humble stonemason, who courageously struggles with life's disappointments only to be struck with unspeakable tragedy. A beautifully depressing human drama, "Jude" traverses the highs and lows of life through its dreary tale of one man's steadfast conviction to his beliefs and to the woman he loves. Not for everyone, "Jude" is a film for realists into serious drama which many will likely regard as a "downer". (B+)

There are three common errors made by directors of historical films that Michael Winterbottom neatly avoids in 'Jude', his adaptation of Thomas Hardy's novel. Firstly, he creates a picture of a livable past, not some shallow collage of country houses and Dickensian squalor but a world in which a normality, of sorts, might reign. Secondly, he sets out to explore that normality, instead of simply judging the past by present values. Finally, he is working with a script that is neither archaic and stiff nor laced with modern anachronisms. Add to this strong direction and casting (Christopher Ecclestone is excellent in the title role, and a young Kate Winslett fetchingly appealing as Sue), and the result is a good film; but it lacks something of a dramatic punch.

I haven't read the book, but one senses from the film that it may represent a fierce attack on then-contemporary values, particularly those involving marriage, values which drive the characters to their ultimate misfortune. One senses this, but in the movie this theme is played down, so the story seems merely to tell of the ups and downs of Jude's life, presented as fairly accidental happenings. A terrible tragedy eventually occurs; and, because of what has happened in the past, a second, avoidable, tragedy then follows. The problem, dramatically speaking, is that the second tragedy appears smaller than the first, thus the end of the film serves as an anti-climax. Without a unifying sense of accusation, we, instead of a powerful polemic, are left with only the tale of an unfortunate.

'Jude' is one of the better, and the least sentimental, of historical films. But something of the point has been lost in translation.

The adage "a great novel rarely makes a great movie" is not as true as is supposed, but I'm sorry to say it's true here. Director Michael Winterbottom and writer Hossein Amini fail here because they fail to understand the town of Christminster, the town Jude loathes and yet wants to be accepted by so desperately. The town functions almost as a character in the novel, but here you feel nothing from it, and therefore the context for everyone's actions is removed. And except for Sue and Arabella(well played by Kate Winslet and Rachel Griffiths, respectively), the characters are underdeveloped). It looks appropriately dark, and the other actors are good, but I felt at the end like there was something missing.

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 admirable 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 supporting 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.