DVD REVIEWS
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
(out of 4) Denmark’s Thomas Vinterberg ( The Celebration) gets right down to business with this new screen adaption of Thomas Hardy’s 1874 romance classic. He drops portions of the narrative that John Schlesinger used for his 1967 screen adaptation, which starred Julie Christie as the intemperate Bathsheba Everdene, the female protagonist.
This helps explain why this story of a determined rural estate owner and the trio of obsessed men who pursue her still seems relevant to our forthright modern era.
It’s a love quadrangle that needs untangling.
Carey Mulligan is Bathsheba, most fortuitously cast for her combination of guile and innocence, the sand inside the oyster that produces a pearl.
She attracts the competing attentions of stoic sheep herder Gabriel (Matthias Schoenaerts), stodgy neighbouring landowner William Boldwood (Michael Sheen) and debonair soldier Sgt. Francis Troy (Tom Sturridge).
One need not be a student of Hardy, or even of bodice-ripping novels, to see where the currents of this emotional river are headed. But there is much pleasure in watching these fine actors navigate rough emotional waters.
Extras include deleted scenes and making-of featurettes. THE SALVATION
(out of 4) Wild West vengeance gets a terrific homage and a bloody reckoning in this oater excursion by Denmark’s Kristian Levring ( The King is Alive), co-written with Anders Thomas Jensen ( In a Better World).
War-ravaged Danes seek peace and prosperity in the America of 1871.
Ex-soldier Jon (Mads Mikkelsen) went ahead of his family to stake a claim. He’s now proudly taking his wife (Nanna Oland Fabricius) and young son (Toke Lars Bjarke) to their new home in rough-hewn Black Creek.
The calm is violently broken — think Sergio Leone movies — when two vile drunks set upon the stagecoach. Before the gun smoke clears, there will be blood, family vengeance pursued and a genre amply hat-tipped.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan enlivens the pro forma proceedings as an aggrieved gang leader out to up the body count.
Eva Green is aces as a traumatized mute woman out to settle her own dark accounts.
But Mikkelsen is the rock as the tortured hero, just as he was in The Hunt, which won him best actor at Cannes, where The Salvation also premiered.
Extras include a making-of featurette. Reviews by Peter Howell