Jude Details

Co-produced by the BBC, this magnificent and appropriately distressing adaptation of Thomas Hardy's final novel did only fair business at British cinemas. Hardy described Jude the Obscure, published in 1896, as “a deadly war waged between flesh and spirit”. Sadly, the novel provoked so much outrage within Victorian society — one critic famously calling it “obscene” — that Hardy never wrote another. The story, which involves social rejection, unrequited love, suicide and, worst of all, intellectual snobbery and religious obsession, is Hardy's bleakest: Jude is a country stonemason who attempts to fulfil his promise by going to university, is betrayed by two women and by his intellectual mentor, then slips into poverty and much worse. Be warned, this is not the jolliest of tales, but it is absolutely gripping and, indeed, heartbreaking, and director Michael Winterbottom and writer Hossein Amini deserve all credit for refusing to compromise the story's grimmer aspects. As Jude, Christopher Eccleston has that haunted and naive look of a man buffeted by fate and destroyed by self-delusion, while Kate Winslet is perfect as Sue Bridehead, the fiery cousin whom Jude loves and whose vacillation really drives the story along. Visually, the film is suitably gloomy — to re-create Wessex and Oxford, Winterbottom used locations as far afield as Edinburgh and New Zealand — and at two hours it's a brilliant distillation of a literary classic.

An unhappy adaptation, with some jarringly anachronistic dialogue, which only occasionally gets to grips with Hardy's tragic story.