← Far from the Madding Crowd
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Far from the Madding Crowd · reception & legacy

2015 · Thomas Vinterberg

How Far from the Madding Crowd has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

Greeted in 2015 as handsome but 'safe' — solid reviews, mild surprise that a Dogme 95 rebel had made a lush costume drama — it has since settled into life as a quietly beloved comfort watch, with Letterboxd affection for it growing steadily.

What's debated

The perennial fight is 1967 vs 2015: does Vinterberg's leaner, warmer take improve on Schlesinger's Julie Christie classic, or does its two-hour runtime sand down too much Hardy?

Its footprint

Bathsheba's line 'It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs' became the film's calling card, and Matthias Schoenaerts' Gabriel Oak is routinely invoked online as the gold standard of the patient, green-flag romantic hero.

Where it stands

Not a canon climber so much as a dependable Letterboxd comfort-film — the period romance people rewatch and evangelise rather than argue over.

★ Did you know? Director Thomas Vinterberg co-founded Dogme 95, whose 'vow of chastity' explicitly forbade period settings and genre films — making this lavish Victorian costume drama pretty much a point-by-point renunciation of his own manifesto, an irony critics gleefully noted in 2015.