It is a long time since I read the book, and this movie version was good enough to inspire me to read it again. The acting was very convincing - for all the key roles.
My two reservations are technical, First, I found it distracting that the setting was so very different from Hardy's Wessex - I understood Mellstock to have been a large village, the street-scape of the location used made it look like a town - and/or a French or Italian town at that. From this site (IMDB), I see that the filming location was Jersey, so that explains the continental connection, I guess. I appreciate that probably no Dorset village would pass for Mellstock, but I would argue that somewhere in the Cotswolds would have been sufficiently close to be accurate. Second, on the version I saw (PBS in the USA) the music soundtrack was so loud that it was intrusive. However, too loud music soundtracks is typical for PBS documentaries too - so perhaps this issue is not the responsibility of the original producer in the UK.
I would probably vote higher than 4, were it not for my desire to counter the apparent ramping up of this movie's score by those associated with its production.
My two reservations are technical, First, I found it distracting that the setting was so very different from Hardy's Wessex - I understood Mellstock to have been a large village, the street-scape of the location used made it look like a town - and/or a French or Italian town at that. From this site (IMDB), I see that the filming location was Jersey, so that explains the continental connection, I guess. I appreciate that probably no Dorset village would pass for Mellstock, but I would argue that somewhere in the Cotswolds would have been sufficiently close to be accurate. Second, on the version I saw (PBS in the USA) the music soundtrack was so loud that it was intrusive. However, too loud music soundtracks is typical for PBS documentaries too - so perhaps this issue is not the responsibility of the original producer in the UK.
I would probably vote higher than 4, were it not for my desire to counter the apparent ramping up of this movie's score by those associated with its production.