User reviews

Life and love can be tragic and beautiful. The ways of society and the heart are not simple and can be quiet opposed.

Jude is a masterpiece as a novel and film. Yes, it is quiet the most painful story, but all lives worth living have pain and heartbreak, love and laughter. This is no sugar-coated romance, but a dark, dirty, tragedy. What affects me so is the timelessness of this story. Michael Winterbottom truly made a wonderful film - he did not write the story folks.

Christopher Eccleston is a master actor, he brings such a full-blown sense of the man "Jude". He really knew this character strongly and I feel that he has a level of intelligence and feeling that is rarely used in modern male actors.

Kate Winslet is a stunning actress. Hard to believe that she carried the level of passion and maturity in "Jude" as Sue Bridehead at the ripe age of 20. She is truly one-of-a-kind and deserves all accolades placed upon her shoulders.

I had no problem with the love scenes and nudity in this movie - although that could be because Chris Eccleston is so incredibly attractive. Isn't love-making crucial and appropriate for two people in love? I don't understand how some people commented poorly on that. It seems quite acceptable for me.

Don't look for mushy weepy romance in Jude. You will find power, grief, passion, love, and bravery. Jude and Sue possess more bravery than most people living today, the tragedy is that they risked everything for their love - which destroyed them and the lives of their children.

Masterpiece film making and acting. Bravo!

An adaptation of Thomas Hardy's novel Jude The Obscure. This film was at its strongest when presenting the book verbatim, but got extremely tedious when it went off on long, irrelevant, and inconsistent tangents.

I think it can work really well to update historical works by presenting contemporary values/contexts (eg. Baz Luhrman's Romeo & Juliet), but this film is so oblivious to the ideas and arguments of the book, one wonders why the director bothered with it at all. Jude the Obscure was an indictment of many of the values of its time, in particular chastity outside marriage, and the equation of class with intelligence and prospects. Both of these get lost under long, badly-shot segments of whining.

I must say that I watched this movie with a jaded eye, I had just finished reading `Jude the Obscure' and expected to see the philosophical, social and mental complexity the book contained reflected in the film. I was so very, very wrong. The plot meanders roughly to the book, glazing over most of the Schopenhauer-driven importance of suffering and welcoming of the death wish. As Jude and his illegitimate wife/ cousin Sue make their way through abject poverty, the plot drags on so much that the misery the two main characters is nothing compared to the misery of watching this movie. To make matters worse, the director throws in a nude scene that has no purpose, not furthering the plot nor matching with the rest of the movie.

My best advice is to pawn the movie and use that money to buy the book. Even cliff notes would be better than this poor literary rip off.

What kind of person is Jude? does he have a love for Latin? Does he really want to be a scholar? What does he think of his wife Arabella? what is she like? Are we supposed to like her, dislike her? because...? because she is sensual? earthy? Is she too ignorant to be a good wife for Jude? Is Jude Smart? We see them have sex..and this means..? Not one scene has any development. Guy walks around in the rain, somebody tells a boy that education is everything...Is this Jude our hero? He is shown trying to memorize some Latin. How far has he progressed ...what does Classical literature mean to him? The viewer's emotions are not guided toward any coherent response ...scenes begin and end without discernible intention.

Lazy, incompetent film directing. Not thought through. Watch a film Like Hobson's Choice by David Lean, in comparison, and appreciate how every image, gesture, every object, conveys thoughts, character, intentions. Someone intelligent sat down and thought through what to show and how. Scenes with beginnings, middles, and ends and meanings and direction. This film is, by contrast, a lazy, stupidly unrealized piece of incompetence. Kate Winslet's performance, and the beauty of the locations are the only positive parts.

The movie itself was pretty good but as a sensitive watcher I would not recommend it to other people like me.

What an awful story that I wish I'd never watched. Only saving grace - Kate Winslet is simply beautiful.