TV Reviews : ‘Return of Native’ Evokes Some of Hardy

Thomas Hardy, the great Victorian novelist, should perhaps remain locked up between the covers of a book. The camera isn’t easily drawn to the density and moody, pessimistic tone of his work, as evidenced by earlier screen adaptations of “Far From the Madding Crowd” and “Tess of the D’Urbervilles.”

But Hardy (1840-1928) is such a wonderful unraveler of thick plots and memorable characters that filmmakers keep trying. Now “Hallmark Hall of Fame” has tackled Hardy’s classic 1878 novel of the English countryside, “The Return of the Native,” the first time the story has been put to the screen.

The British movie, with young, comparatively fresh faces (except for the indomitable Joan Plowright), looks like Hardy and it quacks like Hardy but it’s not Hardy. It’s the surface of Hardy, which still isn’t bad for prime time.

The adaptation (by Robert W. Lenski, acclaimed for such “Hallmark” scripts as “O Pioneers!” and “Decoration Day”) is on the sodden side and, perhaps out of necessity, too deeply trimmed and telescoped.

Shot in Exmoor, England, the atmosphere is keenly realized, unfolding on this “graveyard of a heath,” to quote the sensuous, mysterious Eustacia Vye (Catherine Zeta Jones, who may remind some of a young Vivien Leigh). She’s the muse who spreads her deadly allure and whom one attractive admirer (Clive Owen) insists “doesn’t even breathe the same air as most women.”

As the entitled native who returns to his bleak village, the openhearted Clym Yeobright (Ray Stevenson) is catapulted into a disastrous marriage and goes blind. In a Hardy novel, where people are buffeted around by nature, anything that can go wrong will.

But, crucially, little of the novel’s depth and brooding heart spill through, which isn’t so much the fault of the writer or director (Jack Gold) as it is the intractable problems in transferring Hardy’s rigorous vision to film.

* “The Return of the Native” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS (Channels 2 and 8).