Movie Chile Review

Anna Karenina

By: Jonathan Richards
Published online: Friday, November 30, 2012
Appeared in: Pasateimpo

Capsule review

This is not like any Anna Karenina you’ve ever seen. Director Joe Wright (Atonement) and screenwriter Tom Stoppard have reimagined and restructured the classic story with a stunningly original vision that treads the border between triumph and disaster and manages to keep miraculously to the side of the angels. An Anna Karenina soars or sinks with its heroine. Keira Knightley can charm, she can swoon, she can rage, but when it comes to plumbing the depths of Tolstoy’s tragic heroine, she shows the strain of acting. She hits all the notes, but she doesn’t manage playing between the notes. Rated R. 129 minutes.

Full Review

Anna Karenina, literary adaptation, rated R, Regal DeVargas, 3.5 chiles

Anna Karenina has been around. Trips to the screen by Tolstoy’s doomed adulteress outnumber trips to the altar by Zsa Zsa Gabor, Elizabeth Taylor, and Larry King combined. Greta Garbo flung herself under the train twice — first silently, then with sound. Anna has been catnip for the TV miniseries industry. So you may be thinking, oh, another Anna Karenina.

Believe me, this is not like any Anna Karenina you’ve ever seen. Director Joe Wright (Atonement) and screen- writer Tom Stoppard have reimagined and restructured the classic story with a stunningly original vision that treads the border between triumph and disaster and manages to keep miraculously to the side of the angels.

The movie opens in an ornate theater in imperial Russia in 1874. The story begins to unfold on the stage, then dives backstage, into the wings, up into the lighting grid and catwalks, and then sweeps out the loading doors at the back of the theater into the vast frozen reaches of a Russian winter. It moves back and forth between its various settings and conceits with dizzying elegance. It morphs from a child’s toy train set to a real train coming into the Moscow station, where a grease-smeared worker is crushed beneath the wheels in a grisly accident. Trains will figure again in the plot.

The action is sometimes conventional, sometimes stylized, sometimes impressionistic, sometimes cinematic, and sometimes stagey. Ballrooms full of beautifully choreographed aristocrats dissolve and the principals dance, entranced, alone. As the gimmicks start to tumble in and pile up, you think, uh-oh, this isn’t going to work. But it does.

Wright and Stoppard explode conventions with the exuberance of Bolsheviks tossing bombs, and when the dust settles, you find that the story has you in its thrall. The story, of course, is Tolstoy’s epic tale of a woman who loved not wisely, but, well, disastrously. Anna (Keira Knightley) is contentedly married to Karenin ( Jude Law), an uprightly moral, conventionally wise imperial minister. They have a young son on whom Anna dotes. They are one of those happy families that are all alike. She’s a model of virtue, simply by virtue of her circumstances. She even visits her sister-in-law Dolly (Kelly Macdonald) to counsel her on how to deal with the infidelities of her genial scape- grace brother, Prince Oblonsky (Matthew Macfayden). Anna preaches love and forgiveness, qualities that will be in short supply from her aristocratic society when she falls for Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and begins her slide from grace.

Vronsky is the link between the two love threads of this story. Swaggering and impossibly handsome in his white regimental uniform, he turns the heads of Muscovite maidens, and none more so than the princess Kitty (Alicia Vikander of A Royal Affair), Dolly’s younger sister. So when Oblonsky’s friend Levin (Domhnall Gleeson), an honest, unassuming aristocrat, comes to Moscow from his country estate to propose to Kitty, she turns him down. But Vronsky’s head is soon turned by the beautiful Anna, and the rest is, if not history, certainly the stuff of immortal literature.

The visual impact of this Anna is splendid. Sarah Greenwood’s production design is heart-stoppingly rich, the costumes by Jacqueline Durran are gorgeous, and the cinematography by Seamus McGarvey, guided by Wright’s inspired direction, is a feast.

The performances are mostly impeccable, with special mention due to Vikander, Macfayden, and Olivia Williams as the Countess Vronsky, mother of the home-wrecking count. The countess gets a signature line of Stoppard dialogue: chatting on a train with Anna about life’s adventures in the untroubled early stages of the story, she remarks “I’d rather end up wishing I hadn’t than wishing I had — wouldn’t you?” And Taylor-Johnson gives his character something more than just a pretty face – watch him inhale a cigarette, and if you smoke, you’ll be sneaking off and trying it out.

Law is remarkable. Not long ago he would have been ideally cast as Vronsky. Now he shows new depths of his talent as the upright, indecisive, cold but vulnerable Karenin. Hidden behind a beard, spectacles, and long-skirted coats, the old Jude Law almost disappears.

An Anna Karenina soars or sinks with its heroine, and Knightley fills the role with her dazzling, some- times awkward beauty. She can charm, she can swoon, she can rage, but when it comes to plumbing the depths of Tolstoy’s tragic heroine, she shows the strain of acting. Knightley hits all the notes, but she doesn’t manage playing between the notes.

So when the story ends badly, as you know it must, there is not that kick to the emotional solar plexus that Anna Karenina ought to deliver. Still, it’s a remark- able rendering of one of the world’s great love stories. As Kitty, when she is rejected by Vronsky, says bitterly to her sister, “Why do they call it love, anyway?”

Dolly, holding her baby, smiles with tender compassion. “Because it’s love,” she says.