GRADE: B

When Michael Winterbottom's Jude, the film version of Thomas Hardy's novel Jude the Obscure, introduces Kate Winslet as Sue Bridehead -- the vexing love of Jude's life -- it does so by sticking a cigarette in her mouth smokestack-style and having her do a turn around the room to the visual tune of Francois Truffaut's Jules and Jim. In this, a movie that struggles to avoid any association with costume drama, it's an emblematic moment of cleverness -- an awareness of the film's cinematic antecedents -- that establishes this as a 19th century fable with some measure of currency.

In this case, the antecedent is a story about falling in love with a decidedly headstrong woman. Jude, by comparison, isn't really a love story, but it is certainly a story about what love can do to you. Winterbottom's smart enough to know that he's making a movie, not just "filming a book," and so his movie is nearly as headstrong as Sue, but far less enticing in its personality. Winterbottom, who made his directorial debut in early 1996 with the little-seen Butterfly Kiss, has streamlined Hardy's pessimistic novel into a skeletal but effective (and little-seen) meditation on the ways that society conspires to keep people in their proper place.

Christopher Eccleston (Shallow Grave) is pretty skeletal himself as Jude, a young man against whom the very stars seem to be aligned. As a young boy he is dazzled by the promise of nearby Christminster when his tutor leaves him to study at university. When a man studies in the big city, he's told, he can be anyone he chooses.

Well, not quite, as Jude sourly observes late in the movie. He decides that his failing is trying to do in a lifetime what usually takes generations -- that is, he's struggled to rise above his humble working-class groundings and he has failed. On the way to learning that lesson, he marries one woman and falls in love with another. He finds that his assiduous study of Latin isn't enough to bury his reputation as a "working man." When he finally does kick propriety to the winds, hooking up with Sue in the expectation of a quiet happiness, he finds that life still cannot proceed apace. Because he and Sue are not married -- and because Sue refuses to pretend that they are -- it's a chore simply to find a landlord who will allow them to move in.

Jude is, in some respect, a failure. The story moves too quickly, and with only facile attention given to establishing motivation and atmosphere. Sometimes the directorial shorthand too glib -- we see Jude's wife outside gutting a pig in graphic detail and then cut to Jude inside, glancing out the window from a pile of books on his desk where he studies the classics. Elsewhere, Winterbottom can't help but telegraph the next level of tragedy to befall poor Jude. Much of Jude is fairly bald melodrama, and I'll admit to stifling several giggles, most notably when Jude's ailing aunt (June Whitfield), disdainful of his conduct in matters of the heart, twists the knife in his gut by calling him a "ninny." Fate is cruel, and to Jude it is the cruelest.

Still, a director runs the risk that such potent material will reduce to overstatement and absurdity on the screen, and because Winterbottom's direction is mostly effective, it's easy to forgive the film's lapses. Jude makes stark, effective use of the wide screen and calls hardly any attention to itself as a period piece. The real subjects of the camera's scrutiny are the people involved, especially the long-faced Jude himself. While Winterbottom is never quite able to infuse this version of Jude with a life of its own -- as illustrated by his resort to the Truffaut reference -- it's obvious that he's a capable and literate director.

The movie becomes most absorbing in its latter section, when Jude and Sue finally find one another. Eccleston's fine portrayal of this most hapless man is the linchpin of the movie's first half, and when Winslet becomes his companion and, eventually, his lover, the two performances begin to orbit one another. Winslet's roles in Heavenly Creatures and Sense and Sensibility were such close kin that it was impossible to tell whether her gifts extended beyond her uncommon charisma, but Jude proves her to be a talent of some range. She solidifies these considerations of love, religion, and denial of the same -- my favorite is Hardy's shrewd observation of what it may take to make an avowed atheist believe in God, and in what ways that can represent a betrayal of our mortal companions.

In the course of heaping scorn and misfortune on its characters -- and especially in the gently raging final scene where Jude makes a stirring declaration of love, independence, and selfhood to absolutely no avail -- Jude does eventually complete its picture of a distasteful 19th century world that remains, perhaps, not entirely transformed over all these years. Perhaps it's the gender-swapped counterpart to The Portrait of a Lady. Jane Campion's movie is surer-footed than Jude, but its carefully ironic loveliness stands in interesting contrast to Jude's equally deliberate and ultimately more illuminating bleakness. While James-cum-Campion elucidates a world where a woman is imprisoned in a hell of her own unwitting making, Hardy-cum-Winterbottom illustrates that, so long as we must make our home among other people, freedom really is an illusion.