Tackling Thomas Hardy's bleakest novel is not perhaps the most
obvious choice of second feature for the man who gave us the serial-killing,
lesbian road movie, Butterfly Kiss, but Michael Winterbottom's
free adaptation of Jude the Obscure is inspired.
This success is fundamentally due to a generous screenplay by
Hossein Amini which retains the essence of Hardy's dour novel
while paring down and contemporising the language. This in turn
fuels the performances of Christopher Ecclestone (Jude Fawley)
and Kate Winslet (Sue Bridehead) who burn with a symbiotic passion
and integrity in the stony-hearted England at the end of the industrial
revolution.
Ecclestone (last seen on the box in Our Friends in the North)
stars as the aspiring intellectual who, after a failed marriage,
falls in love with his unconventional cousin Sue. While Sue is
strong enough to flout convention - Jude falls in love with
her over an irreverant cigarette and a pint in a pub before they
finally move in together - her mercurial nature cannot comprehend
or cope with the gut-wrenching tragedy which they eventually suffer.
While the tragedy is one very much of its era, there is a certain
timeless quality captured by Winterbottom in Jude. Winslet
in particular breathes such feisty life into her part that
she transcends the normal limitations of period drama. This is
about people, not costumes.
While the intelligent Ecclestone whose noble, hard gaze perfectly
encapsulates Hardy's deep-thinking dreamer, he is not quite the
Jude who ends up alcholic and dead before he's thirty. However,
there's no emotional payoff here - Winterbottom's Jude is
full-blown tragedy at its best. It takes your breath away.
Reviewed by Monika Maurer
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