Jude

It takes a fair dose of courage to dare to tackle a screen adaptation of Thomas Hardy's fateful tragedy "Jude the Obscure", both because Hardy's tone can be hard to strike and because of the novel's complex themes. Thirdly, the film industry doubts - unfortunately with good reason, it seems - that audiences will flock to a pure tragedy. The young director Michael Winterbottom, however, has refused to be cowed and has made a film from Hardy's novel that is successful in many ways.

In an expository sequence kept in muted colours, the birth of the boy Jude's dream of becoming a scholar in the university town of Christminster is depicted, as Jude's teacher Mr. Phillotson leaves the village with the same dream in view. The colours come on when the film starts on the actual plot.

After a failed marriage to the wild Arabella, Jude goes to Christminster to realise the dream he has clung to since boyhood. In the town he meets his liberated and intelligent cousin Sue, for whom he develops strong feelings, but he cannot offer to marry her, as he is still a married man.

Jude is about a young man who has bigger dreams than society can accept being realised. Firstly, Jude does not manage to get into the university. Instead he is urged to stick to his last as a stonemason. The world around him is not ready for Jude's wish for social advancement, nor his need for moral freedom. When Sue and he finally get together, they have to live like refugees, for every time it comes out that the couple are living together outside marriage, Jude is dismissed from his job.

Jude ends in a terrible tragedy in which the victims are Jude's children by Sue and Arabella, but Hardy's novel does not end there; it is even more bitter in its ending. Fortunately, Winterbottom has judged that one tragedy is enough on film. Jude instead ends with the break-up between Jude and Sue, whose outlooks on life have finally been crushed by circumstances. In a last scene, however, Jude and the film express the hope that the two may find each other again one day.

Christopher Eccleston and Kate Winslet are excellent in the central roles as the indomitable Jude and the free spirit Sue. Liam Cunningham is Mr. Phillotson, who marries Sue but later resignedly accepts that she lives with Jude. His college dream has long since been abandoned.

Jude is both a social drama and a love story. Fate, a central theme in the novel, is considerably reduced, but Winterbottom has nevertheless managed to capture a Hardyesque mood with his beautiful and atmospheric images.