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Vinterberg's compressed adaptation is a restrained, russet, handsome thing; it honours the circumspect romanticism of Thomas Hardy's novel, if not all the storied complications thereof. What it lacks is any wildness in its turns of heart, or that of its independently reckless heroine: Carey Mulligan offers an attentive, serious-minded reading of Bathsheba Everdene, but hardly projects the aura of a woman animated by desire.

Adapting a novel with a plot as unwieldy as that of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) for the screen requires compromise: the film must either remove a number of scenes that appear in the novel or squeeze as many scenes as possible into a watchable span of time. Thomas Vinterberg's recent adaptation almost always opts for the latter technique, and the result is a film that is completely dutiful, very attractive, and mostly dull.

Vinterberg is quite capable of pulling out the obvious emotional and sociopolitical ley lines that structure the individual choices driving Far From the Madding Crowd. In making those structures so clear to the viewer, however, Vinterberg and his actors tend to allow us to feel hopelessly alienated from their Victorian constraints.

Beautifully and at times stunningly edited by Claire Simpson, this adaptation of Thomas Hardy's towering 1874 novel is triply smart. It uses dramatic concision, snappy country-life couture, and bold, graphic-novel colors to bring a contemporary tang to a capacious Victorian classic.

The BBC] is notorious for its brown-nosing translations of great works of English literature... But that's a good risk-free model: Treat the book like a blueprint. Otherwise, you've got an episodic movie like the new Madding Crowd, which acts as if it's late for a train. None of the book's cosmic ironies – its spell-casting – takes hold. So what you're left with is an arrangement of coincidences around the friendship between Bathsheba Everdene and Gabriel Oak.

[What the movie has] is Carey Mulligan on top form as the alternately astute and impulsive Bathsheba... Certainly, it's our investment in her which holds the whole film together, since the script's attempt to compact Hardy's doorstop tome comes to serious grief in the later stages, and Vinterberg's directorial approach is surprisingly bland, perhaps stymied by budgetary restrictions granting only so much period recreation.

Just as French filmmaker Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterley (2006) – another adaptation of a key English novel by a non-native director – impressed with its perspicacious rendering of an allusive landscape not her own, so Vinterberg's otherness has opened his eyes to the distinctive Dorset setting of Hardy's beloved book.

Carey Mulligan plays Bathsheba Everdene as a flint: hard, sharp, but able to spark or flake when struck from the right angle. If there's one thing Far From The Madding Crowd gets right, it's this aspect of her character, even as it struggles, like so many Thomas Hardy adaptations before it, to find a purpose for itself beyond "widescreen study guide." Picturesque and impersonal, it evacuates incident upon incident, as though Hardy's plotting were the runs.

As a cinematic condensation, it mostly works, even if the pace sometimes feels a bit frantic. Vinterberg shoots simply, prioritizing performances over the merely picturesque, though he lets some handheld Dogme-style jitteriness intrude during moments of great agitation.

This Bathsheba Everdene is all wrong, and it's hard to know where to lay the blame. Carey Mulligan plays her, but it seems Vinterberg and screenwriter David Nicholls have tweaked the character to underscore her strengths and soften the edges of her weaknesses. As written by Hardy, Bathsheba is bracingly whole and human; here she's been outlined, and thus circumscribed, by an eager student's highlighter.

Each twist of this tragicomic love story feels rushed-through, as if we're watching a season-long soap opera that's been inelegantly condensed. As a result, the film lacks any impassioned spark, something Vinterberg tries to make up for with plenty of gauzy pillow shots of grassy English landscapes. More often though, he sticks disagreeably close to his actors, as if trying to recapture some of the visceral charge of his Dogme 95 family melodrama The Celebration (1998).

Approaching the material without an eye for what it might have to say about today's society, Far from the Madding Crowd loses the novel's original subversiveness in favor of frothier details: charging strings layered over horseback rides straddling seaside cliffs, fiery sunsets, and heaving storms. This fixation on dreamy fluff elements diminishes the film's potential, transforming it into a high-flown tale of complicated romance rather than an incisive social critique.