text: Thomas Hardy is one of my favorite authors. Some truly wonderful movies have been made from his novels ("Far From the Madding Crowd," "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," "The Mayor of Casterbridge"), and I had high hopes for this one. The Hallmark-Hall-of-Fame-ification of "Return of the Native" totally wrecked it. The cast was terrific, the photography excellent, but the script was dismal and the direction positively ruinous. People walked up to people, said lines, walked away. A meager excitement developed when Clive Owen and Catherine Zeta Jones (very young, very beautiful) exchanged a bit of flesh-pressing, but even Clive, who is a superb actor, couldn't save it. It was awash with the usual Hallmark "romantic" strings background music and pretend bumpkins offering plot exposition, and what could have been dynamite turned out to be awful. The richness of the above three movies was commpletely absent.