Far from the Madding Crowd (Carey Mulligan) Film Review

Set in English farming country in the mid-late 19th Century, we follow the exploits of Bathsheba Everdene, an educated woman with not much to offer outside of her schooling, though she's too headstrong to get trapped into the property-based class system of the times (she's not one to be someone else's "property") by marring the nearby handsome shepherd and farmer named Gabriel Oak just because he's proposed without so much as a courtship. Not saying yes, but also not saying no, they find their status reversed when he loses his farm while she inherits hers, and circumstances are such that he eventually becomes her employee. Chemistry notwithstanding, Bathsheba has her share of courters in the form of meek-but-wealthy middle-aged neighbor William Boldwood and impulsive-but-adventurous military sergeant named Francis Troy.