Jude the Melodramatic
Robertson Davies is my favourite author, but Thomas Hardy is probably in the top three. Because of this, I was really excited to watch the 1971 adaptation of Jude the Obscure. I loved the 2003 adaptation of The Mayor of Casterbridge (my favourite Hardy novel), so I guess my hopes were high.
It’s been a while since I read the book – four or five years. My memories of its details are foggy, but there were certain things that I took away from it. The mood of the book seemed pervasively dark to me, full of deferred hope and promise.
To me, Jude was constantly trying to chart his own course through life and getting beat down, but always kind of resigned to the fact that it was happening. And I always got the impression that Sue was fairly level-headed. She knew what she didn’t want out of life and, while she sometimes got confused, she seemed to be fairly rational.
For these reasons, it was almost depressing to me how this adaptation turned out. I think it was a television miniseries, as it came in two disks with several parts on each. I mention this because I hope it will somehow explain how melodramatic it was. This overly emotional Jude was certainly not the Jude I remember from the novel. I don’t remember him flying off the handle every single time he spoke with Sue. He’s up, he’s down. He’s up, he’s down. Sue wasn’t much better either.
These photos don’t quite do it justice. He freaked out so constantly that I couldn’t even finish watching.
Sorry, Jude. I know this is just a movie, but I think our relationship might now be too awkward to carry on.
Category: Fiction Writing/Books, General