My review of Masterpiece Classic’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (2008 ), Part One, was rather benign considering all the horrible events the poor girl had to endure. Tess, having weathered as much misfortune in two years as most people experience in a lifetime, weds her Angel and confesses her sin. Now here’s where the plot became problematic for me: As a woman living in the modern world, I cannot like Angel. Yes, he’s young and idealistic and has already bent the rules by marrying Tess, sacrificing a bit of the family honor in the process, but his actions smack too much of high school, 
where a boy will pursue a girl, then drop her because she’s a slut. “The woman that I love is not you,” he said after hearing her out, and I know this is the point author Thomas Hardy was trying to make. Different worlds. Different manners. Different mores. Clash of cultures. Regardless, I cannot forgive Angel for abandoning Tess after she’s revealed that she’s carried another man’s child. Angel’s attitude remained prevalent well into the 1960’s, and I thank my lucky stars to be living in this enlightened, more forgiving time. Without this crucial plot development, we’d be staring at a happy ending, but the viewer still has almost half of this two-part film to watch.
Eddy Redmayne and Gemma Arterton were splendid in this scene. Gemma as Tess is at first brimming with hope, then crestfallen as she begs for Angel’s forgiveness. Redmayne manages to show conflicting feelings – anger, hurt, and love – as he bids Tess goodbye, unable to accept from his rigid, puritanical upbringing that she’s a fallen woman.
Groby
Tess returns home, having failed once again. Explaining her decision to reveal her secret, she says simply to her mother: “I love him. It would have been a sin to deceive him,”demonstrating her purity of heart and innate goodness. With Angel heading for Brazil, Tess prepares to find employment … and jumps from the frying pan straight into the fires of hell. In her new position as a farm girl on bleak Flintcombe-Ash farm, Tess remeets an evil enemy from her time on the D’Urberville estate. Groby, the farm manager, shows her no pity and cuts her no slack during a harsh winter. Worse, Tess will not be paid until after a year’s hard labor.
Bleak Farm
Coincidentally (for the plot now depends on many such twists) Tess finds Marion, her milkmaid friend, working at this inhospitable place. Not surprisingly, Izz joins them too. And when the two former milkmaids ask questions about her marriage, Tess’s replies: “No pity. No questions either. I’m just plain Tess Durbeyfield, just as before.”
One cannot help to continue watching this trainwreck of a plot as the melodrama keeps churning. It is human nature, after all, to stand still and observe another’s misfortune. Tess goes to visit Angel’s family to ask them for help, but changes her mind. Returning to the farm, she stumbles upon a revival tent with Alec inside it. One must suspend disbelief and suppose that everyone lived within walking distance of each other, and that frequent encounters out of the blue did not seem coincidental.
Alec, the preacher
After his mother’s death and a tussle with his soul, Alec becomes a preacher, but one look at Tess and all the faith is knocked out of him. Alec then leaves his new calling … just like that. Hans Matheson and the film’s writer try their best to interject some reality into Alec’s scenes and solicit sympathy for his character, but at this point I felt it was best just to watch the film and not make logical sense out of events as they unfolded.
Tess was put on this earth to suffer, and suffer she does, with misfortune rolling her way every time she turns around. She forfeits a year’s wages for her backbreaking work when she returns home to visit her ill father. After his death, the family must leave their leased house because, while her mother and siblings are respectable, Tess is not. The persistent Alec follows the family as they seek another lodging, stalking Tess and pressuring her to be with him. With no money, house, job, or prospects, Tess finally succumbs to his relentless advances. She has given up on Angel, believing he will never return.
Meanwhile Angel has been sick in Brazil and has undergone a sea change in attitude. After recovering from yellow fever, he returns home and goes on a quest to find Tess. He pays a heavy penance as he learns of her life after he abandoned her, realizing what misery she’s experienced. When he locates her in the resort town of Sandbourne, looking like the scarlet woman she’s become, she begs him to leave, crying out: “It is too late for me now, I’m already dead!” Portentous words. After coming such a long way to find her, he seems to give her up rather quickly, but Tess is made of sterner stuff.
Moment of bliss
Gemma’s beautiful features flit from innocent to worldly to distressed and angry as she convincingly plays an older and wiser Tess. She confronts Alec, who is nasty, spiteful, and possessive, and kills him. One can imagine how scandalized the Victorian reading public was with this turn of events. According to the PBS press release, “Tess of the D’Urbervilles was so shocking that Hardy had to withhold selected chapters during its first appearance in serial form.These chapters were later restored in the published volume.”
Tess and Angel share only two days of tender bliss as he tries to help her escape from the law. Angel is now completely on her side and will not abandon her, but Tess knows it’s too late. Instead of leaving their shelter she begs him for one more night as man and wife: “Why put an end to all this joy?” Why indeed?
Poor Tess. Poor, doomed Tess. Hunted as fugitives, she and Angel spend their last night together at Stonehenge. This stone age monolith is an appropriate setting for the denouement of a tale that is all about a clash of 
cultures in a changing age. The death imagery is a bit heavy handed in these scenes, but at this point the viewer has given up on subtletly. As the law closes in on her, Tess tearfully embraces Angel: “It couldn’t have lasted,” she said, “Too much happiness.” Which is when I drew out my hanky and bawled.
Thomas Hardy felt passionate about this novel. “To him, Tess was a symbol of rural Britain, a pagan goddess at odds with the social and technological change sweeping across England’s West Country in the late 19th century.” 
(PBS Press Release) To me, her story is heart breaking. I agree with her friend Izz Huet, who concluded after speaking with Angel, “Whatever she’s done, she doesn’t deserve this.”
For sheer gut wrenching entertainment value, I give this production high marks, but as a Janeite, I can only give Hardy’s soap opera plot a grade that barely passes.
Jane Austen's World 
[…] Read Part 2 of my review here […]
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I really want to see Tess of d’urbervilles! Thanks for such precious comments!
Adriana
you seem surprised by all the horrible that you go through with tess. i just finished reading the book right before watching the masterpiece classic and thought that it was very true to the story. and yes, it is gut-wrenchingly horrible, but i love how strong tess is through it all. although, the actor that portrayed angel seemed too young for me.
i was a little glad they cut out the ridiculous gothic sleep walking scene… that seemed like a selling point for that time. also, the scene where tess snaps the necks of half-dead pheasants out of pity for them …shiver…
Not surprised, exactly, for I read the book years ago. But with the passage of time, I find Hardy’s coincidences and plot twists too contrived for my more modern sensibilities. Despite all the Victorian histrionics, Tess’s story is riveting and it is her moral conviction and strength that keeps this story from descending down soap opera depths. I recall being particularly touched in the novel when she spends the night among the poor wounded pheasants who were so brutally left to die where they had been shot. (And wringing their pitiful necks to end their suffering, as you said.) But let’s face it. An author today would have a tough time explaining such convoluted plot contrivances to a publisher.
I actually thought Angel was the right age – young and idealistic. Our Tess was only 17 when the story began. She experienced so much in such a short time.
I’ve never read the book (though I am going to pull it out this week to answer my own question: was it seduction or was it rape?), but I knew that this being a Thomas Hardy novel, it would be dark and the heroine would suffer.
I waited to watch both parts all in one sitting yesterday evening, and maybe that was a mistake. Because by the time I started the second half, I was already annoyed to death with Gemma Arterton’s little-girly, high-pitched voice. She broke out of it a couple of times toward the end (mostly when she was on the verge of sobbing), but it grated.
As far as the production quality of this film goes, it was lovely. The scenery was spectacular. The costumes were pretty good at showing the delineation between classes. I loved Gemma’s final two costumes (the black velvet dressing gown and the traveling suit)—mostly because she had her hair done up and those ridiculous bangs off her forehead and she looked older than about fourteen.
As far as the story goes, I’m glad I watched the film all the way through just so I know how completely awful everything got, but it’s not one I’ll be subjecting myself to again. As you pointed out, it was far too melodramatic and with too many convenient coincidences. And at times, I felt like I’d seen the film before (I think because Hardy used some of the same types of scenes in Under the Greenwood Tree, which is a much better story, IMO).
Tess is what I term a “too stupid to live” heroine. She kept putting herself into one horrid situation after another. She had the opportunity to make things better by getting up some gumption and going to Angel’s family, but instead she ran away and made things even worse for herself. I know Tess is regarded as a character of strength and internal fortitude, but all I saw was willful ignorance and self-imposed punishment. If she really had strength of character and internal fortitude, she would have introduced herself to Angel’s family in spite of what they’d been saying about her and striven to prove to them that she was worthy of the man she married.
But, alas, not everyone can write heroines as strong as Jane Austen’s.
[…] Here is a review of Part 2 from Jane Austen’s World. […]
I understand how cliched coincedental a lot of it seems but really you’re missing the point. The plot is hardly the point but rather what is important is the views he holds and points he makes on Victorian society, morals and religious standards throughout.
Also, a large point you missed is that Angel rejects Tess not just because she’s a fallen woman, that is an issue but it’s not the main one, Angel built Tess up so much so he put her on a pedestal to the point where he starts calling her the names of Goddesses because he sees her as a ‘virginial daughter of Nature’ and it’s because he suddenly realises that well actually she’s just an ordinary woman and that all of these ideas he had the she was the embodiment of his new pastoral and ideal lifestyle are shattered and he takes it badly by fleeing.
I’m doing this as A-Level now so I suppose I would obviously do it in more depth rather than just watching the film but it was something I just couldn’t not say. :)
Thank you for the clarification. I read the book years ago and did not study it formally for class. In this post, the critique was aimed at the film, not at the book, which I loved for its richness of language and symbolism, which is woefully lacking in any cinematic adaptation.
Thanks so much for the review. After waiting all week for part 2, I fell asleep during several crucial parts. And online viewing isn’t offered. So thanks for helping me catch up. I ordered the book and will read the whole saga.