Anna Karenina

Rating

Director
Joe Wright
Screenplay
Tom Stoppard (Novel: Leo Tolstoy)
Length
129 min.
Starring
Keira Knightley, Jude Law, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly Macdonald, Olivia Williams, Domhnall Gleeson, Emily Watson, Michelle Dockery
MPAA Rating
R for some sexuality and violence.

Review
Leo Tolstoy’s classic romantic drama Anna Karenina has been done frequently in the past, each project generating seeming to find something new and fresh in the material while hewing closely to the original source material. Director Joe Wright tackles the tale in a vivid, traditional, yet unconventional manner.

Anna (Keira Knightley) isn’t in love with her husband (Jude Law). She lives comfortably, but longs for something different, exciting and otherworldly. When she meets the young cavalry officer Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), her passions are awakened and she embarks on a dangerous love affair with him threatening to rip apart her own marriage and risks becoming an outcast under the religious laws and social rules of her country.

Wright films Anna Karenina with his typical care and lusciousness, the vivid colors leaping from the screen, but it’s his interesting decision (forced by budget limitations) to position the story as a stage play that gives it much of its visual flair. Oftentimes the works of great literature seem a bit too theatric to be realistic and employing that medium as a framing device isn’t original, but Wright recognizes that and adds his own personal flair to the film. Starting out with a voluminous stage, we are frequently treated to shifting sets and twisting designs as the show moves carefully through the lives of Anna, Vronsky and the various others whose love, happiness and contempt fill the narrative.

Knightley’s work as an actress has been limited at best. Only when she steps before the screen for Wright does she seem to excel. While her performance is no more interesting than those she gave in Pride and Prejudice and Atonement, she so clearly fits the beleaguered romantic archetypes that dominate period romantic dramas that casting anyone else would seem like folly. Law is strongly cast as the wounded husband whose vengeance sounds overzealous, but is so frequently infused with touches of compassion and tenderness that the honesty of the performance highlights the selfishness of his wife’s actions.

Matthew Macfadyen plays Anna’s boisterous brother Prince Oblonsky and gives him the exuberance and outlandishness that largely paints him as an ineffectual sibling. His frequent womanizing has jeopardized his own relationship and should act as a model against Anna’s behavior, but when love’s involved, it’s an inconvenient comparison. Taylor-Johnson, in spite of being the romantic lead of the film has very little personality, perhaps it was bred out of his character by his noble family, but his performance doesn’t give us enough depth to permit us to believe that Anna would fall in love with him for naught other than his looks.

Sarah Greenwood’s brilliant artistic design for the film effortlessly blends the theatrical elements with real world concepts. The centerpiece effect is one early in the film where Anna is moving out into the frozen wilderness of the real world walking through an expansive door surrounded by the stage’s proscenium arch. It’s a gorgeous effect and one of many that highlight the brilliant work Greenwood and her set decorator Katie Spencer have wrought.

One of the reasons films like this have such a frequency of pulling out Oscars for art direction and costume design is that they seem inextricably linked, neither being realistic enough without the other. Jacqueline Durran’s costumes are confections we have come to expect from the genre even if they are frequently more beautiful than functional and designed more to catch the eye than drive the story.

Wright started out in film with period dramas Pride and Prejudice and Atonement, but took a detour through the predictable pablum of The Soloist and then drifting into the obscure with the children’s anti-fable Hanna, a film so off-beat for his fans that no one was certain what to think. While I think Hanna is his most fascinating feature, Anna Karenina is a return to the style in which he so readily excelled. It’s a colorful saga that blends the best of the past with a keen observational style that sets itself in the present. We are transported into a world that transcends the theatrical staging of the events on display and becomes a visual feast that could have used a bit of narrative tweaking, but ultimately pleases more frequently than it disappoints.
Review Written
March 11, 2013