Anna Karenina

Joe Wright’s bold visualization of this classic of Russian literature is a dazzling feast for the eyes, but a tad too precious. The adaptation of Tolstoy’s epic by the great playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard dispenses with most of the novel’s complexities and cuts to the chase of the love story. Wright’s adroit staging of the film makes its clipped narrative come off less like the visual-CliffsNotes of so many literary adaptations and more like an ornate music-box or snow-globe presentation of the story. He sets all the St. Petersburg scenes on a theatrical stage that is constantly and surrealistically adapting to the action. While this daring and exciting style does rob the viewer of any true connection to the interior life of the characters, it grants us a lavishly beautiful exterior at which to gaze and marvel.

Normally this style-over-substance approach is something I have a hard time enjoying. I did not like the dull and repetitive stage settings Rob Marshall used in his modern film-musicals Chicago and Nine, or the fascinating but failed attempt to built Las Vegas on a soundstage that Francis Ford Coppola did in his 1982 disasterpiece One From The Heart. But this film employs its theatrical techniques in a much more graceful way—somewhat along the lines of what Lawrence Olivier did in the first act of his 1944 film of Henry V. Perhaps because Tolstoy, like Shakespeare, is so well known and so often adapted, the problem of the film not really engaging on a dramatic level is more forgivable than if this were original material. Anna Karenina is a story that has been well made on film before, and so I find myself actually enjoying this theatrically stylized approach more than I would were this were yet another straightforward retelling of a classic. The film is not as good as the previous year’s wonderful, very grounded and straightforward adaptation of Jane Eyre, but it is perhaps more memorable for its uniqueness. I also embrace this approach because the world of live theater has been so inundated with video screens and digital technology that it’is refreshing to see a movie overtaken with the trappings of the stage.

Keira Knightley is just the right choice to pay the title role in this skin deep an adaptation. She has really come into her own as an adult actress and her Anna possesses a sexual maturity and hunger that transcend the film’s theatrical conventions. Jude Law is also excellent as her cuckolde and Domhall Gleeson grounds the film as Levin—the one character who is always free of the theatrical surroundings. Unfortunately Aaron Johnson’s terrible peformance in the critical role of Count Vronsky drags the film down from any chance it had at greatness.  If a younger Jude Law (circa his performance in The Talented Mr. Ripley) had played this role, it might have been a film for the ages.