Danish director Vinterberg (The Celebration; The Hunt), might have been expected to turn in a challenging reading of the Thomas Hardy novel, one to loosen the grip of John Schlesinger's 1967 version starring Julie Christie and Terence Stamp.
But the new adaptation, written by David Nicholls, who so brilliantly adapted Blake Morrison's And When Did You Last See Your Father?, is so measured and tame as to verge on the banal. Worse, two of its pivotal quartet of characters are grievously miscast.
The story is of a woman courted by three men: Bathsheba Everdene (Mulligan), a woman of determination and independence, has no sooner arrived to live with her aunt in the country than she is batting away a proposal of marriage from a neighbour, the frugal, decent shepherd Gabriel Oak (Schoenaerts). She has no desire to be tied down, she says.
When he suffers a reversal of fortune and she inherits the farm, the gap between them widens further. He takes a job as her shepherd as she deals with two other suitors in turn, one cruelly - the middle-aged, well-to-do and abjectly infatuated Boldwood (Sheen) - and one dangerously - the dashing soldier Frank Troy (Sturridge). Things end badly for more than one of the above.
There's a lot to like about the new version, not least Mulligan's spirited performance, which makes Christie's look like a shampoo commercial: her Bathsheba has dirt under her fingernails and messed-up hair and a ferocious pluck that just fails to hide her uncertainty both as farmer and woman.
