Based extensively and brazenly on Thomas Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd, Tamara Drewe ran for 2 years in The Guardian as a comic strip based around the misdeeds of a hot young woman from London, who stirs the desires of three men in a sleepy rural village.
Tamara is the latterday Bathsheba, with smug and loathsome best selling novelist Nicholas Hardiment as the Boldwood character, sex-god rock drummer Ben as Sergeant Troy, and man of the earth Andy as the worthy Gabriel Oak-like hunk. Add in Nicholas's long-suffering wife Beth, an American academic with writer's block, and a pair of interfering local teenage girls, and you have a whole hatful of characters.
Stephen Frears, as ever making the most of the unexpected, does a good job of putting it all together, and the editing is seamlessly imaginative. The script is spot on, the characters well-acted, and the countryside looks fantastic. So why do I have a reservation about the whole enterprise? I guess it's because the original material - a comic book lightly spoofing a classic novel - falls between two stools, especially when turned into a film with real live people, rather than drawings. Are we meant to mind about what happens to these people, especially when it's fairly obvious from early on how it's all going to end? Apart from Nicholas, none of them are outright odious, but nor are they especially complex. Tamara likes to have sex, Ben behaves like a caricature rock star and Andy mopes around looking manly.
Yes, that's because they're cartoon characters, I hear you say (I've got 20/20 hearing). No they're not, I riposte. They were cartoons, but now they're people, and I need more subtlety and colour than is available here. It might be different if it was laugh out loud funny, but the humour is low key, and the film's narrative is as much melodrama as comedy. I did enjoy the film as it went along, and would, on balance, recommend it. But it's a fleeting entertainment that didn't leave me feeling wholly satisfied.
