Jude (1996)

Instant Favorite.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Jude Fawley is a young man working as a stonemason in a rural village in Victorian England. Jude is highly intelligent, and dreams of a university education, even though he is from a working-class background at a time when very few working-class people went to university. Jude's ambitions appear to have come to an end when he makes an imprudent marriage to Arabella, a sensual, earthy farmer's daughter who does not share his intellectual aspirations. After only a few months, however, Arabella abruptly abandons him and emigrates to Australia.Now feeling free to pursue his original ambition, Jude moves to the university city of Christminster, but his application to study at the university is rejected, largely on the basis of his lowly social origins. He falls in love again when he meets his cousin, Sue Bridehead, who shares his intelligence and, like him, sees herself as a free spirit with no time for social convention. . At this period in her life, however, Sue is not so contemptuous of social convention as to live openly as man and wife with another woman's husband, and because Jude is still legally married to Arabella she decides to marry Jude's former school teacher, Richard Phillotson. Later she changes her mind and abandons Richard to live in an adulterous relationship with Jude.The film is, of course, based on Thomas Hardy's novel "Jude the Obscure". It keeps reasonably closely to Hardy's plot, although with one or two alterations, and also keeps his invented place-names. Hardy intended these names to disguise real places- his "Christminster", for example, is supposed to be Oxford- but the film was not always shot in these locations. Much of it was filmed in the North, especially in and around Durham, although there are exceptions. We see a shot, for example, of the Dorset town of Shaftesbury, which does indeed appear in the novel under the name of "Shaston".The last film I saw from director Michael Winterbottom was "The Claim", another Hardy adaptation, in that case of "The Mayor of Casterbridge", but one which transferred the action from Dorset to the American West. I hated "The Claim", partly because of its unnecessary change of setting, but also for other reasons, so I was pleasantly surprised by "Jude". It has its faults, but they are mostly those of its literary source, which is far from being my favourite Hardy novel. (I enjoyed "The Mayor of Casterbridge" a lot more). Neither Hardy nor Winterbottom can make me believe in the "Father Time" episode, which struck me as a piece of unnecessary sensationalism when I read it. ("Father Time", in the novel, is the nickname of Jude's son by Arabella, who turns up towards the end of the story; the nickname is not actually used in the film, where the boy is referred to as "Juey").Also Winterbottom, perhaps even less than Hardy, never really makes me understand just what Richard has done to merit his shabby treatment at the hands of his wife and his former pupil. In the novel he can come across as a rather dull pedant, but here, as played by the good-looking Liam Cunningham, he comes across as decent and likable. He is, admittedly, rather older than Sue, but in an age when older man/younger woman marriages were commonplace this in itself would not have been an obstacle to a happy marriage. (Cunningham, in fact, was only 35 when the film was made, only three years older than Christopher Eccleston, who plays Jude).These points apart, however, "Jude" is overall a reasonably good film. Eccleston, who regards this as his best film, gives an excellent performance as Jude, a proud, passionate and free-spirited man who pays a heavy price for his defiance of social convention. (Apart from the failure of his university ambitions, Jude finds it difficult to get work when potential employers discover that he and Sue are "living in sin"). It has a dark, gritty look, quite different to the normal bright colours and lavish costumes of most British "heritage cinema", but this is appropriate to the humble social backgrounds of its main characters and to its sombre theme, the downfall of a young man who had much to offer society but found himself rejected by it. 7/10

It's an excellent movie because it scores in each corner: it has a wonderful, gripping story that can speaks to anyone with heart. As it's an adaptation, you will be interested in reading the novel. Beyond the personal drama, I remember two scandals that are always verified today: 1) education is elitist as it expels those who don't have pedigree 2) Christian congregation is highly hypocritical as they achieve to turn a message of love into one of rejection. It has wonderful locations, between the green pastures and the austere British cities (for those who have seen Spielberg's "War Horse", it has the same ambiance). Winterbottom is inspired to fill his frames and Johnston's soundtrack is just one of the best ever as it gives such poetry to the pictures. As for the cast, it's just an amazing reunion: Eccleston finds his career pick as his Jude is such a good man: always sincere, hardworking, caring, sometimes sad but never quits! Kate is always fascinating by her precocity and by her personal choices for free- spirited characters!

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.

As a huge Thomas Hardy fan, Jude the Obscure being one of my absolute favorites, I think that this film is truly well done. It captures the essence of Jude and Sue's relationship convincingly making these characters truly three dimensional. Understandably, not everything in the novel was included in the film, but what was included in the movie stays true to the novel in all of its significant aspects. Although Hardy's Jude has curly brown hair, Chris Eccleston does such a fine job portraying Jude that it is hard to imagine Jude looking any other way. As for Kate Winslet, she shines and gives Sue more depth than can easily be found in the novel. The reversal of their views of life is portrayed so well that it feels as though it is Hardy himself directing the movie. Wonderful job, few have captured Hardy's cynicism and misanthropy the way this movie does.