Anna Karenina
3? stars out of 5
Starring: Keira Knightley, Jude Law, Aaron Taylor-Johnson
Directed by: Joe Wright
Running time: 130 minutes
Parental guidance: Adult themes
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There are moments in Joe Wright?s exquisitely artificial remounting of Anna Karenina when Keira Knightley stares at the camera in passionate close-up and we are invited to drink her in: the lush pout, the soft sculpt of her chin, the promise of her bare shoulders, the yearning in her eyes. It?s a face men might ruin lives for.
But that?s not all there is to Knightley. The actress, who has served as a kind of muse to Wright (Atonement, Pride and Prejudice) also arrives with a slouch and a crooked smile: It?s a face men with ruined lives might also have second thoughts about.
And so it is with Anna, a married woman in Leo Tolstoy?s vast love story who surrenders to forbidden desires and lives to regret them. It has been turned into a film that seems to be afraid of its passions and therefore mounts them behind glass: Anna Karenina is filmed as if it was a play into which we have been invited backstage to see the hidden workings of its artifice. Screenwriter Tom Stoppard may be commenting on the theatre of Imperial Russia ? filmed with sumptuous glitter, flickering lamps and embroidered excess ? or the theatre of desire itself. ?Love,? an older woman says to Anna on a train (a toy, chugging through an artificial field of snow). ?Is it love?? Anna asks. ?Always,? the woman says.
Anna is married to cold and proper bureaucrat Alexei Karenin (Jude Law, hiding behind a goatee and receding hairline) in St. Petersburg, but goes off to Moscow to attend to the adultery afflicting her sister Dolly (Kelly Macdonald). In Moscow, she comes under the spell of the dashing cavalry officer Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who seems hardly less prissy than Karenin), and they become the scandal of the steppes.
?Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,? Tolstoy wrote, and the film applies the principle to love affairs. Vronsky and Anna ? she in a black dress ? fall in love while dancing, a trope so familiar that Wright turns it into a piece of framed performance, with Vronsky and Anna sweeping across a floor of aristocrats frozen into a tableau of formalized privilege. Wright extends the choreography to other key events: A horse race rushes across the stage of a theatre; government workers raise and lower their arms together to stamp documents.
The formalized structure works only if we feel the proscenium burned away by the heat of attraction. But unlike the melodrama of the 1935 version with Greta Garbo, which was designed to melt your heart, this version runs cool. Knightley is at once regal and gawky ? you half expect her to raise the hem of one of her lush dresses and kick a soccer ball ? and Taylor-Johnson seems half-formed and callow. ?Oh, to be young again,? Anna says. ?Shrouded by that blue mist.? But the mist seems too ephemeral to be real.
Anna and Vronsky are meant to be a contrast to Anna?s brother Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen), who wears his adultery lightly and complains that in a long marriage ?you find yourself a martyr to distraction.? His unfaithfulness is shallow and selfish but at least he seems to be enjoying life.
Anna Karenina is a tragic story about breaking the rules and the lavish punishments ? cut dead at the opera, disapproved by society ? that result. Wright has turned it into a rich operetta of unhappiness, tinged with hints of social commentary. We barely see the underclasses, and the Russian Revolution was still almost 40 years away, but there?s a proto-socialist hero in the wings.
He is a farmer named Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) who falls in love with Kitty (Alicia Vikander), the woman who lost Vronsky to Anna, and rescues her into a life of propriety and marital happiness. Levin works shoulder to shoulder with his farm workers, scything the crops with the kind of devotion that, decades later, Soviets would put on their propaganda posters. Levin is the future. Anna, alas, is the past.
Source: http://o.canada.com/2012/11/29/movie-review-anna-karenina/
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