Stylish but barely mediocre overall

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Absolutely Fantastic

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

What kind of person is Jude? does he have a love for Latin? Does he really want to be a scholar? What does he think of his wife Arabella? what is she like? Are we supposed to like her, dislike her? because...? because she is sensual? earthy? Is she too ignorant to be a good wife for Jude? Is Jude Smart? We see them have sex..and this means..? Not one scene has any development. Guy walks around in the rain, somebody tells a boy that education is everything...Is this Jude our hero? He is shown trying to memorize some Latin. How far has he progressed ...what does Classical literature mean to him? The viewer's emotions are not guided toward any coherent response ...scenes begin and end without discernible intention.Lazy, incompetent film directing. Not thought through. Watch a film Like Hobson's Choice by David Lean, in comparison, and appreciate how every image, gesture, every object, conveys thoughts, character, intentions. Someone intelligent sat down and thought through what to show and how. Scenes with beginnings, middles, and ends and meanings and direction. This film is, by contrast, a lazy, stupidly unrealized piece of incompetence. Kate Winslet's performance, and the beauty of the locations are the only positive parts.

How to summarise Jude? They say that in the late Victorian era there was a school of thought that almost glorified the state of childhood, believing it to be a perfect time in a person's life when innocence reigned, but I don't believe Thomas Hardy followed this line of thinking. No matter how young, both Jude the father and Jude the son seem weighed down by doom and misery in this film.I think this film fell under the category of "independent film", which is just as well. Following the Thomas Hardy convention whereby nothing can end happily, Jude ultimately ends with a miserable mood, but in a sense this is perfect. Although it's not the sort of film anyone would want to watch on a "down" day, I'm sure that - had this film been given the Hollywood treatment, the storyline would have been mercilessly rearranged to have a loving happy ending. The problem is, if that happened, it wouldn't be Hardy.There is something stark about the opening of the film - the scratchy music, the loneliness of the solitary young Jude, the clattering noise of the bird-scarer and yet, combined with the black-and-white filming, it evokes the appropriate mood for the film so easily and so early on. In amongst the winter scenes and the aerial shots that show only a tiny bit of movement in an otherwise still landscape, Jude and Arabella's wedding is possibly the busiest, most colourful scene in the whole film. Of course, there are also many interesting social and sometimes political issues raised, partly because of the time in which the film is set. Had the story been moved forward a hundred years, there would be nothing remarkable about Sue attending lectures, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer in the pub, visiting Jude without a chaperone. There would be nothing surprising about being educated when you had a job - like Jude's - that didn't require it. But Jude and Sue are tragic in a way - both impulsive people in a world and a time when a commitment like marriage was not to be taken lightly.There are many bad omens in the film - Aunt Drusilla remarking that "The Fawleys were not meant for marrying" - and the particular tragedy of Jude's character is the way he rushes into things only to regret them later. Though Jude is tragic, his cousin and partner Sue is equally blighted - to watch her change during the film from an irreverent, sparky, impertinent, independent single woman into a tortured, guilty (in her own eyes) shadow of her former self is heartbreaking. Although in some ways women's lives and opportunities were limited in various ways in the nineteenth century, as a female with a job, no husband and no parents or other family, she did have quite a lot of freedom. Oddly, Jude's wife Arabella is not so different from Sue - she is as forward and daring physically as Sue is intellectually. During their marriage, she and Jude almost reverse roles - she goes out to kill a pig single-handedly when he is too sensitive to do so. There is an interesting contrast between Jude's sex scenes with Arabella and the one he has with Sue. The wedding night with Arabella is warmly lit and cosy, whereas the scene with Sue is stark, almost grey, with a cold feeling and yet in some ways Sue and Jude are more necessary to each other than Arabella and Jude ever were. On the costume side I note that - as with the more recent Kate Winslet film Finding Neverland - the costumes don't look like fashion plates, they look like real clothes (occasionally none too clean but when you take into account how time-consuming and labour-intensive it must have been to wash them, it's hardly surprising). It seems strange now that Kate must only have been twenty or twenty-one when this film was made - in her first scene she looks mature whereas in others she seems very, very young.This isn't the easiest film to watch - there are a few sections I almost always fast-forward - but that is not to say it's not good. Every time I watch it, a bit of me wants things to end happily, but - as I said before - that just wouldn't be Hardy.

As a huge Thomas Hardy fan, Jude the Obscure being one of my absolute favorites, I think that this film is truly well done. It captures the essence of Jude and Sue's relationship convincingly making these characters truly three dimensional. Understandably, not everything in the novel was included in the film, but what was included in the movie stays true to the novel in all of its significant aspects. Although Hardy's Jude has curly brown hair, Chris Eccleston does such a fine job portraying Jude that it is hard to imagine Jude looking any other way. As for Kate Winslet, she shines and gives Sue more depth than can easily be found in the novel. The reversal of their views of life is portrayed so well that it feels as though it is Hardy himself directing the movie. Wonderful job, few have captured Hardy's cynicism and misanthropy the way this movie does.

This film tells the story of a boy who from his childhood dreamed of becoming more. He hopes to leave the brutal rural world of pig-slaughtering and rolls in the hay for the intellectual world of the university, which to him represents the freedom to think one's own thoughts and to live one's own life.Sadly, his conduct and, more importantly, his opportunities cannot bear his aspirations. When faced with a "pregnant" girlfriend, he marries her, as any "good" man should. When faced with mockery from wealthy undergraduates (a scene all the more odd because it pits two Doctor Who's against each other), Jude tries to prove his intelligence by reciting Latin in a pub, realizing in the end that no matter how much Latin he studies he will always be a laborer to these people. He becomes infatuated by his free-thinking cousin, Sue Bridehead, who is similarly pursuing education and independence and who also rejects Victorian conventionalities about women belonging in the home.Sadly, the two cousins find that they cannot reject the values of their world without dire consequences, for them and for their children.Happily, this film beautifully depicts Sue and Jude's struggles in gorgeous shots of the landscape and rich images of the two leads. Christopher Eccleston gives Jude a warm humanity and Kate Winslet creates a Sue Bridehead whom we easily believe could both rebel against social custom and also be crushed by it. I particularly liked the depiction of the harshness of Victorian life: the working in the rain, the beatings, the cruelty to animals, the pain of childbirth, the lack of privacy endured by poor families. The film is not Masterpiece Theatre (no criticism just a comment on style) and shows us clearly what the university means to Jude and just what he is trying to escape.If you liked "The Remains of the Day," "The Age of Innocence," "Tess" or "The Idiot" (book, I've never seen a film of this), you will appreciate this film and the book, as well.