This 1998 ITV version of Tess of the D’Urbervilles works quite a bit better than the Beeb adapation of 2008.
The main reason is down to the casting of the 2 main leads.
Ollie Milburn is less wet than Eddie Redmayne as Angel Claire
And Justine Wadell is far more convincing and compelling as Tess than simpering Gemma Arteton with her trouty pout.
Justine Wadell conveys a native naive charm that Gemma Arteton totally lacked. As an earthy milk maiden she really gets stuck in to her cows udders. You could easily imagine her doing a full days work down on the farm; whereas Arteton just seemed like she’d mislaid her way down a dusky Dorset backlane on route to a Kensington & Chelsea wine bar.
Justine Waddell makes Tess look, and seem, irresistibly charming and cherishable
No wonder our likely lad Angel has fallen head over heels for the lovely lass.
I really enjoyed the whole middle section of the film on the farm with the cows and the curlews, where Angel and Tess are tentatively, and teasingly, falling in love with one another. He – Ollie Milburn – wasn’t such a limp lettuce as wimpy Eddie baby Redmayne.
The last hour of the drama, where much tragic melodrama starts kicking off, wasn’t really holding together too well. I don’t know if this might not be a fault of the novel itself. I mean, why does Angel have to abandon Tess so dramatically and drastically on their wedding night? It just doesn’t make coherent sense of his undying, almost devotional, love for her.
And why is Alec D’Urberville so obessively fixated on her if she’s a married woman? He turns into some psychotic stalker person who she intially resists, but is ultimately too weakened by circumstance (the impending doom of impoverished family) to repel. This breakdown of her resistance was too flimsily flirted over to be entirely convincing.
The twisty turns of too many coincidental events, the helpless hoops that Hardy makes his protagonists jump too torturously through, are what constitutes their ‘fate’ and tragic destiny I suppose. But it does make for somewhat convoluted and deterministic drama. As is the case here. Which unfortunately, makes Tess seem simplistically stereotypical, a tragically doomed heroine – and Justine Waddell soon loses all the contours of her hard won individual identity as Tess, and resorts to sleepwalking through the last half an hour on an autopilot of sugary sweet cliches. Her stoic forbearance all gone. To be replaced by lachrymose weeping and wailing.
Anyway, I doubt whether there is ever going to be a good, let alone a defintive, version of Tess. She’s doomed to be an under-realised, unredeemed, helplessly hopeless Hardyesque ‘victim’. Doomed to her flawed and fallen-like fate.
Director: Ian Sharp, England
6.5/10
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