Anna Karenina
A thrillingly theatrical take on Tolstoy's classic.
DIRECTED BY JOE WRIGHT
In Joe Wright’s audacious adaptation of Tolstoy’s seminal tome, the social stagecraft that governed Russia’s Tsarist aristocracy is rendered beguilingly literal. This Anna Karenina is an invigorating and inventive departure from the tradition of stuffily reverent screen translations, offering up a dynamic hybrid of cinema and theatre that gives apt expression to the choreographed destinies of its courtly players.
At the same time, this Anna is also uncommonly comprehensive, thanks to a screenplay from Tom Stoppard that serves Tolstoy’s twin romantic arcs more evenly than most previous film incarnations. Alongside the tragic triangle formed by Keira Knightly’s iconic socialite, the callow, caddish Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and Anna’s prim, cuckold husband (an excellent Jude Law), Stoppard’s script devotes significant attention to the happier courtship between Kitty (Alicia Vikander) and the unpretentious, agrarian-spirited Levin (Domhnall Gleeson).
Wright, accordingly, modulates his bravura mise-en-scene, curbing his theatrical conceit when visiting Levin’s earthier farmstead environs. As well as attesting to the character’s authenticity of spirit, these shifts temper what might otherwise have been an overwhelmingly ostentatious design sense. Inevitably, Wright’s grand gambit does have something of a distancing effect, but, given that nothing short of a mini-series could hope to approach the richness of Tolstoy’s text, there’s still plenty to appreciate in a film that dazzles this intensely while keeping the novel’s essence intact.