Wayfarers across the centuries, English novelist Thomas Hardy and Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg meet in the fictional country within a country of Wessex, which the novelist described in his preface to Far From The Madding Crowd as "a merely realistic dream country." It is in the partly-real, partly-imagined Wessex and Hardy's 1874 novel that the writer and filmmaker quite amicably meet and combine their talents. Of course, such bonhomie does not necessarily guarantee excitement, the kind of friction that often produces artistic brilliance. This latest (and fourth) film version of Far From The Madding Crowd demonstrates a shared feeling for landscape and a somewhat reluctant romanticism on the part of Hardy and Vinterberg. Brought newly to the screen, Hardy's beloved novel is above all a handsome piece of work in which the visual appeal of its actors, its wardrobe and landscape are happily allowed to trump the novelist's typical fatalism and te