Who is Ultron? What is he? I went into “Avengers: Age of Ultron” not knowing whether the name referred to a man, a concept, or a laundry powder, and I came out none the wiser. All I can tell you is that it speaks in the voice of James Spader, and that it can’t make up its humongous mind whether to save the world or to trash it. (This is a Marvel movie, so the third option—simply leaving the world to get on with its daily business, in its own sweet and shambling way—is not on the table.) To start with, Ultron seems to be a computer program, and at one point it even squares off against another computer program—a ball of sparky golden light versus a ball of sparky blue light, bobbing and spitting at each other, without a human in sight. Maybe one day all movies will look like that.
As for our heroes, last seen in “The Avengers” (2012), the same team takes the field, pretty much unchanged, and still lacking a really solid tight end. We have Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.), the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and the guy with the bow and arrow (Jeremy Renner), whose name I can never remember. In a new and exciting bend in the plot, one of them turns out to have a wife and kids, which gives the gang a place to hole up and the wife a chance to say, “You know I totally support your Avenging.” Even cozier is a burgeoning affection between Black Widow and the Hulk—not someone you would choose to have a crush on you, but that’s love. In one deeply peculiar scene, they both confess to being incapable of having children. “I physically can’t,” he claims. Probably a blessing.
The story begins with a fight in a forest and ends with a fight in a city that floats in midair. In between, there is a fight in a castle, a fight on a freeway, and a fight in the wake of a cocktail party. The loudest fight is a tussle between Iron Man and the Hulk, which is part of a cunning scheme to rip the Avengers apart. Bring it on, I say. It has something to do with dreams, which are triggered by a blast of hypno-magic from the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), a new player in the game; each hero is disabled by harsh visions, tailored to touch upon his or her worst fears. I vaguely hoped that Thor would find himself holding hands with Hello Kitty, but no joy.
The experience of watching “Avengers: Age of Ultron”—which is not just long but, in Iron Man’s words, “Eugene O’Neill long”—runs as follows. First, you try to understand what the hell is going on. Then you slowly realize that you will never understand what is going on. And, last, you wind up with the distinct impression that, if there was anything to understand, it wasn’t worth the sweat. I gave up around the time that we were presented with something called the Mind Stone, yet another cosmic thingamajig, and apparently one of six “infinity stones,” which sound like the kind of stuff that Bilbo Baggins would hawk on QVC. All of this is a bitter disappointment, not least because the movie was written and directed by Joss Whedon. He is a smart and witty operator, as was evident to anyone who saw “Much Ado About Nothing,” the deft little jeu d’esprit that he knocked off in between this dose of Avenging and the last. Now and then, in “Age of Ultron,” amid the pap about “molecular functionality,” we get glimpses of what Whedon can do, as in the fine scene where Thor’s comrades attempt, in turn, to lift his mighty hammer. Could this be what it feels like to make a Marvel film, as you strive to free up the dead weight of all that cod-mythology? On the night I saw the movie, Whedon arrived to introduce it. “I’m really tired of it,” he said. Everyone laughed, thinking that he was joking. Now I’m not so sure.
Do we need a new film of “Far from the Madding Crowd”? Hardy’s novel was published in 1874, and was turned into a John Schlesinger movie, with Julie Christie, Terence Stamp, and Alan Bates, in 1967. Now it has emerged again, with a script by David Nicholls, who shaves the leisurely action to an hour less than Schlesinger required; Hardy fans will have a grand time grumbling at all the nips and trims. Some set pieces vanish entirely—the scene at the fair, say, in which Sergeant Troy, the cad of the story, who has gone missing, shows up and dons a disguise. Schlesinger dwelled on this at lavish length, so why doesn’t his successor, Thomas Vinterberg, follow suit? Because, I suspect, he is addressing a new generation, which knows neither the earlier film nor the book. He wants his twists to hang back, and then to come out of nowhere, like thunder.
Carey Mulligan plays Bathsheba Everdene, a country lass who inherits a farm in Wessex. She has three admirers, but only one who adored her before her fortunes rose: the shepherd Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts), who remains as unfellable as his name suggests. Though she spurns his early proposal, he stays by her side, to help with the management of her estate. Then, there is Boldwood (Michael Sheen), her moneyed neighbor, and another rejected suitor. “I have some interesting pigs,” he tells her, as if that would boost his cause. How you prevent such a fellow, crushed by his own decency, from sagging into a bearded Ashley Wilkes is no easy task, yet Sheen succeeds, and Boldwood’s brave smile grows dreadful to behold. “I feel the most terrible grief,” he says, when Bathsheba, taking leave of her senses—or, rather, obeying them to the full—marries the mercurial Troy (Tom Sturridge). As Hardy puts it, “When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.”
And look what she throws it away on. Sturridge’s Troy, I’m afraid, is a dumbfounding blend of waxwork and wimp, and so often do his eyes mist over that I wondered whether his real problem was not the vagaries of lust but the Wessex pollen count. Why Bathsheba would give him the time of day, let alone her body and soul, is a mystery, but the film toils hard to make us believe in that surrender. Hence the wonderful closeup, after the first kiss with Troy, of Bathsheba’s hands held out before her, dangling, as if desire had reduced this tough and resolute figure to a doll. Needless to say, there is no right way to play her, any more than there is a right way to play Cleopatra. Hardy gave his heroine a symphonic range, and all an actress can do is pick out certain tones and strains—the fluted whimsy by which Bathsheba is occasionally stirred, or the brassiness of her anger. Julie Christie was the more accomplished flirt, and her beauty was composed of fire and air, whereas Mulligan relies more darkly on earth and water. She hoes the clods of soil like a peasant in a Millet painting, and plunges up to her waist to join Gabriel for the seasonal washing of sheep. In the light of that pluck, Nicholls is right to uproot a vital sentence from the book and assign it to her, practically intact: “It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language designed by men to express theirs.”
Those words are so startlingly modern that, to late-Victorian ears, they must have verged on revolution. No wonder film directors keep coming back to Hardy, who dares them, as it were, to match the acuteness of his noticing—Bathsheba’s “black silk dress licking up a few straws and dragging them along with a scratching noise upon the floor.” Vinterberg, who is less rhapsodic than Schlesinger, and more inclined toward crisis, homes in, time and again, on the exertions of muscle and heart. When Gabriel finds that his sheep have rushed uphill, to a cliff top, we track him as he hares after them, desperation driving his great limbs. No less agonized is the scene in which he glances up from his scything, sees Bathsheba pass proudly by in a horse and trap, with Troy at her side, and resumes his labors with added attack, like the grimmest of possible reapers.
Schoenaerts, who is Belgian, can’t manage a proper West Country accent, but, then, nor can anyone else in the film; the rustic group on whom Hardy depends, as a tragicomic chorus, becomes a mere backdrop. Yet Schoenaerts, so formidable opposite Marion Cotillard in “Rust and Bone” (2012), continues to compel the eye. He is massive and passive, yet swift to act when the harvest, and thus the livelihoods of all concerned, is menaced by storm and flame. Just as Schlesinger’s film screams 1967 (check out Christie’s hair), so Vinterberg’s version will doubtless come to be viewed as a typical product of our time, in both its haste and its recurrent gloom. Though its social scope is narrower than Hardy’s, you do come away from it with a true sense of the shrouded world that he devised, where fate could frown upon even the blithest day. That is why Bathsheba, as she sets off to claim her inheritance, is already clad in scarlet—the same dashing hue as Troy’s uniform. She hasn’t met him yet, but he awaits. ♦
