Ryan McNeil
Period films aren’t my cup of tea. I love the stories at their essence, but I’ve seldom picked any of them up to thumb through after my schooldays ended. As such, I go to period films with hesitation. I don’t hesitate because I believe they will be bad, I only hesitate because I believe I’ll be fighting the feeling of familiarity for two hours.
So when a period film can come along and astonish me, I count that as something to make note of.
Adapted from the classic novel by Leo Tolstoy, the film tells the tale of the titular character (Kiera Knightley), a married socialite and her affair with the well-to-do Count Vronsky (Aaron Johnson). When we first meet Anna, she is on her way from St. Petersburg to Moscow to visit with her brother, Nikolai (Matthew McFadyen). Nikolai’s marriage is in disarray thanks to his indiscretions, a situation that will come up again in the story before the curtain closes.
At the train station, Anna meets Vronsky for the first time. The Count must feel he has succumbed to love-at-first-sight, because from that moment on he becomes so infatuated with Anna, that he all but forgets about Kitty (Alicia Vikander), a debutante he’d been chasing. This is bad news for Kitty, and worse news for Levin (Domhall Gleeson), whose marriage proposal Kitty rebuked clumsily, believing that Vronsky would be proposing at any moment.
Anna’s affair with Vronsky is anything but discreet. She dances with him at a ball, shares stolen moments in plain sight, and even frets over him during a horserace he participates in. None of this sits well with Anna’s husband Karenin (Jude Law). Hailed as a leader and a true Russian hero, he is the half of the couple that all of society respects. Thus when Anna’s trysts become the subject of gossip, he isn’t seen as a cuckold so much as he is seen as a victim.
However, as Anna will quickly point out, her marriage with Karenin was one of arrangement. How is that supposed to compete with what she believes she has found with Vronsky: True love?
I feel at a bit of a disadvantage never having read the Tolstoy classic. Something tells me if I’d sat in a lecture hall discussing the themes and ideas of the novel for a month or so, I might be better equipped to write this review. As such, I cannot comment on the film’s success as an adaptation, only on what I took away from it. Perhaps that’s better in the long run. Perhaps that will prevent me from wasting a few hundred words on how it does its source justice…or short-sells its source entirely.
My last few reviews have focused on mental wanderings the films have sent me on, but my biggest takeaway from ANNA KARENINA comes entirely from the film’s technique. Specifically: Whether you like the film or not will depend on what you think of its direction. That seems like an obvious statement given the role direction plays in any successful film, but in ANNA KARENINA, the direction is very much on display.
Most of the film is set inside of a grand theatre. Characters step on and off the stage, move about through the wings and rafters, with sets moving in and out as the scene requires. The theatre stands in for halls of government, a grand ballroom, a train station, and a racetrack. In a way, the theatre becomes a character itself. the theatre becomes so integral to the experience of the film, that the moments set outside the theatre are what feel jarring. Where other films would feature scenes set in sun-soaked meadows, or farmers’ fields as grand set pieces, here they seem oddly out-of-place.
Beyond the theatre itself, there’s the way everything is staged. Time and again the extras surrounding our protagonists are used like a chorus. Sometimes they are frozen in tableau, sometimes they pick up instruments and play the score, sometimes they do things in time and create a heartbeat for the dialogue in the scene. Beyond that are moments that are so beautifully photographed that I lost count of how many times I said “great shot”.
All in all, Joe Wright directed his ass off with this film, and whether or not you care for that might well determine whether or not you like this incarnation of ANNA KARENINA. You might well find the direction to be a gimmick, overbearing, and distracting. I can’t necessarily argue with any of any of those accusations, since they are all quite valid. For me though, these tricks and techniques were a successful move. The story is one that’s been told a few dozen times in a few dozen ways, so if it is to be dusted off again, I appreciate an adaptation that comes with a specific vision.
I’m not an english scholar, so I cannot delve too far into how any of those tricks underline the central themes to the story. What I might suggest though, is the way so much of the story’s interpretation comes down to casting. Were Joe Wright to cast the parts of Anna and Vronsky with wholesome actors, one could find themselves identifying with a couple that wants to defy so many conventions in the name of love. The way Knightley and Johnson play their parts however, this particular viewer saw them both as selfish twits, and never once felt any sort of pity for the bed they made for themselves.
One of the core themes of ANNA KARENINA is, of course, love. It’s easy to forget nowadays that most of us have reached a point where we can choose who we spend our lives with, and that those choices are made with our hearts. Love is a multifaceted emotion, and one that can be directed towards ideas and works as much as it can be directed at a person. To that end, I believe this film to be a grand labour of love. It has love for its subject and love for the art form. Like the love its characters profess to be feeling, the film itself will be whispered about and criticized. I however won’t be a party to the gossip. What I have witnessed here is true love, if ever such a thing existed.
Great review! I read some reviews of this one that basically tore the movie apart. I’m definetly going to check it out when it comes on DVD.
I’m a fan of the story and I quite liked the book and we didn’t have a decent adaptation of it for decades now.
I can understand people not liking it, but I don’t understand why one would want to eviscerate the movie. I might even give the book a try now – it’s only a thin little novella, right?
Had Wright not made the decision to take the film in the brilliant stylistic direction that he did, I think I would have hated it. The same problems that I think ATONEMENT had ANNA KARENINA has, but setting it in a theater made me, not necessarily ignore those problems, but accept them. Normally, I’d call a story like this rote and cliche, but then I realize that ANNA KARENINA invented this story, and probably tells it better than anyone else. I thought the performances were all uniformly excellent, with Law, MacFadyen, and surprisingly Knightly standing out! While MacFadyen was such a force of manic energy and Law was sublime as Karenin, this was the best I’ve ever seen Knightly. And even though the substance was “eh”, the whole thing was just so bold and theatrical that I couldn’t not love it!
You had problems with ATONEMENT? Dude, wtf? (I kid)
In a lot of ways, it feels a lot like what Julie Taymor tries to do, but often misses. It’s a melding of theatre and film, and if you’re a lover of both, how can you *not* fall for something like this?