Jude (1996)

Best movie of this year hands down!

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

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

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure is a very complicated and ambitious book, and while heavy-reading it is a fine piece of literature. This 1996 film adaptation is a rock-solid adaptation, that is ambitious and realistic. I will admit some parts like the killing of the pig is anything but tender, but none of the scenes are over-sensationalised.As an adaptation of the book, it works very well. If I had a quibble, the secondary characters could have been developed more than they were depicted. The screenplay is well crafted; the writers and the director have at least some idea how Hardy's work should work on film and stay relatively true to the book. The music both haunting and beautiful at the same time was absolutely outstanding.The direction is very fine, never sluggish and never overdone. It was about right. The cinematography is superb, dark, fluid and sensitive. And the period detail was just as good. It was this element alone that contributed to the mood of the adaptation. The love story here which is dirty and tragic was beautifully realised, and very rarely struck a false note.The performances were just brilliant, no overplaying or underplaying as far as I could see. Special mention must go to the two lead performances. Christopher Ecceleston is a very talented and I think under-appreciated actor, and in the title role he was perfectly cast and showed real versatility. As Sue Brideshead, the beautiful Kate Winslet is positively luminous and is true to her character. Out of the supporting performances, the best is Rachel Griffiths as Arabella, a very modest performance I must say.Overall, has its minor flaws but a very well done adaptation of a complicated book. Always realistic and never overly-sentimental as I feared. Though the ending is heart-rending. 9/10 Bethany Cox

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.

I disliked the characterization of Sue in this film. Sue was supposed to be "higher" than Arabella, spiritual and intellectual. To see her smoking a strange man's cigarette and carousing with the boys in the bar was a bit of a shock. And the bit about "your child killed my children" was not at all like Sue. At no time in the book did she attach blame to anyone but herself. Her ultimate neurosis was her complete self-centeredness. She led poor Jude and Fillotson a merry dance and ended up ultimately rejecting both of them. That's one of the reason I detest this character, in the book as well as the movie. Nothing matters to her but herself. You even get the sense in the book that the death of the children only mattered in its reflection on herself.The movie is also missing the ultimate irony, Arabella's second "seduction" of Jude and his eventual death in her home, in her bed. Christopher Eccleston is wonderful as a consumptive; they should have given him a lovely death scene instead of leaving him standing in the snow.Kate Winslet is a beautiful Sue, but the characterization is a bit too tough and brazen. Christopher Eccleston was simply sublime. And did anyone else notice David Tennant in the bar? Two Doctors in the same room... :)

Jude Fawley(Christopher Eccleston) lives in a small agricultural town. He is a stonemason who aspires to a higher education level and to go to the university. He marries his childhood sweetheart, but it soon appears that it was wrong from the beginning. She had tricked him into the marriage thinking she was pregnant. They split, he goes to a nearby city and she goes elsewhere. In the new city, he meets his cousin Sue(Kate Winslet), with whom he becomes enthralled with. They both know the relationship is impossible, so they arrange a marriage to a professor(Liam Cunningham) at the university Jude hopes to go to. Within 6 months, the marriage is over and Sue asks for a divorce so she can be with Jude. Her husband says, no. Sue leaves him anyway and she and Jude begin to live together. Their life is the life of abject poverty. At one point they have to auction off their possessions to pay the bills. When people find out they aren't married and have 3 children, he loses his job and they must move on. In the end due to a terrible tragedy, Jude and Sue are separated permanently, though they are still in love and still married to each other's hearts.This is a brutal, realistic film. Thomas Hardy wrote it in the 19th century, but the topic is relevant today. I think just about everyone knows someone or a family that is homeless, had to go bankrupt, had cars repossessed, had to hawk their possession, had to take on 2 or more jobs. I think I've made my point. Having children would have made all of the above worse.All the actors were brilliant, but I must pick two out especially. Christopher Eccleston plays Jude simply as though he knew him. That, in his mind, Jude may have lived down the street from him. The second is also called Jude played by Ross Colvin Turnball. He played Jude's son of the woman he married. She had gotten pregnant after they were married. Jude never knew he had a son with her. This young actor has tremendous presence. Turnball also played his character simply. He could have been the boy he pretended to be.BEWARE: Because it is very realistic, it has an "R" rating with nudity, sexual situations and an adult subject matter. I wouldn't recommend this film for anyone below the age of 17.