In late 19th century Britain, Jude (Christopher Eccleston) is a conundrum. Born to a poor family, he nevertheless loves scholarly pursuits. A kind teacher tells him that not far from his pastoral village, the great city of Christminster is the way to academic success. Jude decides at once he wants this, desperately. However, in the meanwhile, by chance, a farmer's daughter, Arabella (Rachel Griffiths) spies him and wants him for herself. Throwing Jude's ambitions off course, Arabella says she is pregnant and a wedding follows soon after. It's a dismal match. What's more, Arabella's pregnancy doesn't advance. After a horrendous winter night, when Arabella insists they slaughter a pig and dress it, Jude has had enough. He departs for Christminster. Yet, the hallowed walls of higher learning are not made for the poor folks, alas. Jude finds work as a stonemason in the meanwhile, but when he applies to the college, he is rejected, despite his evident knowledge of the classics. This young man is in despair. However, his attentions are soon diverted by an introduction to his long lost cousin, Sue (Kate Winslet). The two are mates immediately, loving the same subjects and living life not quite by the rules. This results in Sue losing her calligraphy job but Jude helps find her another one, a teaching position. Yet, when Jude confesses he is married, Sue rushes to tie the knot with the senior teacher at the school. Now, BOTH OF THEM, are married to a partner they don't love. Yet, these two can't stay away from each other. Eventually, Sue leaves her husband for Jude and the two traverse other towns, pretending to be man and wife. Somehow, they are always found out. In addition, they become the parents of three children, making their lives difficult. What will become of them, these two whose strong ambitions receive society's slaps in their faces? This majestically sad classic from Hardy will probably never be put to the screen as well as it is here. First, Eccleston and Winslet are perfection in difficult roles while the secondary actors are very fine, too. Then, the scenery and costumes are superb. One really believes they have been transported back to an earlier time. Then, too, the director Michael Winterbottom presents many beautiful scenes; one is the "seaweed stalk" fight that Jude and Sue have on the beach in happy times. Beware, however, there is full frontal nudity from Winslet and other bold sexual scenes. Most importantly, Hardy's conflicting themes are made for heavy ponderings. What is good and what is evil? Are conventions to be kept or broken? Is God a lovely father or a punishing taskmaster? One will not come away from this movie without being asked to answer these questions that are truly impossible. If you are a thoughtful film goer who loves the best in cinema, you would be very amiss to miss Jude.

If I had just started ranting about how much I hated this movie, it would not portray the true beauty that is so easily over-looked. Yes, this movie made me want to kill myself, but I do not say that in a "this is the worst movie ever" kind of way. This movie was intended to be a depressing example of how love is tested and how life is full of tragedy.This movie was definitely not one that I have watched if I would have known how it would make me feel, I am more of a happy-movie kind of person. But after watching it, I started to realize that there were many beautiful lessons to be learned from it.So all-in-all, 'Jude' is a mixed bag of: pain, love, tragedy, beauty, depression, and then more pain and depression.

This was a depressing and disturbing movie. I Couldn't get this movie out of my head for a couple days and in a bad way! I wished I would of turned it off before I was so traumatized by it! It's long, cold , depressing and a waste of 2+ hours. The only reason I hung on was for the actors. Kate and Christopher made the best of a terrible story. The director did a great job of putting you right there in the movie. Unfortunately it's not a great place to be. Some of the scenes were just a little overly disturbing for my taste. This movie could of ended an hour earlier and it wouldn't of mattered. I strongly suggest skipping this unless you really want to fell deflated afterward.

How to summarise Jude? They say that in the late Victorian era there was a school of thought that almost glorified the state of childhood, believing it to be a perfect time in a person's life when innocence reigned, but I don't believe Thomas Hardy followed this line of thinking. No matter how young, both Jude the father and Jude the son seem weighed down by doom and misery in this film.I think this film fell under the category of "independent film", which is just as well. Following the Thomas Hardy convention whereby nothing can end happily, Jude ultimately ends with a miserable mood, but in a sense this is perfect. Although it's not the sort of film anyone would want to watch on a "down" day, I'm sure that - had this film been given the Hollywood treatment, the storyline would have been mercilessly rearranged to have a loving happy ending. The problem is, if that happened, it wouldn't be Hardy.There is something stark about the opening of the film - the scratchy music, the loneliness of the solitary young Jude, the clattering noise of the bird-scarer and yet, combined with the black-and-white filming, it evokes the appropriate mood for the film so easily and so early on. In amongst the winter scenes and the aerial shots that show only a tiny bit of movement in an otherwise still landscape, Jude and Arabella's wedding is possibly the busiest, most colourful scene in the whole film. Of course, there are also many interesting social and sometimes political issues raised, partly because of the time in which the film is set. Had the story been moved forward a hundred years, there would be nothing remarkable about Sue attending lectures, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer in the pub, visiting Jude without a chaperone. There would be nothing surprising about being educated when you had a job - like Jude's - that didn't require it. But Jude and Sue are tragic in a way - both impulsive people in a world and a time when a commitment like marriage was not to be taken lightly.There are many bad omens in the film - Aunt Drusilla remarking that "The Fawleys were not meant for marrying" - and the particular tragedy of Jude's character is the way he rushes into things only to regret them later. Though Jude is tragic, his cousin and partner Sue is equally blighted - to watch her change during the film from an irreverent, sparky, impertinent, independent single woman into a tortured, guilty (in her own eyes) shadow of her former self is heartbreaking. Although in some ways women's lives and opportunities were limited in various ways in the nineteenth century, as a female with a job, no husband and no parents or other family, she did have quite a lot of freedom. Oddly, Jude's wife Arabella is not so different from Sue - she is as forward and daring physically as Sue is intellectually. During their marriage, she and Jude almost reverse roles - she goes out to kill a pig single-handedly when he is too sensitive to do so. There is an interesting contrast between Jude's sex scenes with Arabella and the one he has with Sue. The wedding night with Arabella is warmly lit and cosy, whereas the scene with Sue is stark, almost grey, with a cold feeling and yet in some ways Sue and Jude are more necessary to each other than Arabella and Jude ever were. On the costume side I note that - as with the more recent Kate Winslet film Finding Neverland - the costumes don't look like fashion plates, they look like real clothes (occasionally none too clean but when you take into account how time-consuming and labour-intensive it must have been to wash them, it's hardly surprising). It seems strange now that Kate must only have been twenty or twenty-one when this film was made - in her first scene she looks mature whereas in others she seems very, very young.This isn't the easiest film to watch - there are a few sections I almost always fast-forward - but that is not to say it's not good. Every time I watch it, a bit of me wants things to end happily, but - as I said before - that just wouldn't be Hardy.