Anna Karenina Reviews

Emotional depth gets lost in Joe Wright’s adaptation of Anna Karenina, but it sure is beautiful to stare at. Leo Tolstoy’s novel of familial disintegration and the romance that leads to its main character’s eventual destruction is no stranger to film, so you need a new hook to make your version standout. I’m not sure the hook for this one was the right choice.

 

Tom Stoppard’s screenplay has designed Anna Karenina as taking place within a large proscenium theater with sets that collapse or move to reveal the next section. It’s a neat trick to be sure, but one that calls to much attention towards itself as the film goes on and saps the power away from the drama unfolding. It becomes a distracting exercise in watching actors trying not to fuck up their marks while masking that interior panic. What works on an actual stage production does not always translate to a filmed one.

 

Sometimes these moments are beyond gorgeous tableaus, but they often exemplify Wright’s limitations as a director. His mind is always working overtime to come up with visual ideas, but there’s often very little “why” behind these ideas as they exist merely to titillate. For every blessed quiet moment there’s five more of strum und drang for the sake of it. Occasionally these flashier moments work well, like a horse race edited to the frantic beating of Anna’s fan, but more often they needlessly call attention away from the already complex interpersonal geometry of the main players and onto the geometric patterns of the production.

 

There’s also the little matter of treating the setting as a stage leading to an uneven quality to the film’s performances. Some actors go for the more natural route that’s typical of film, a sublime Domhnall Gleeson and Alicia Vikander, while others go for more arch, mannered performances that would work better on a stage, Ruth Wilson and Matthew MacFayden spring to mind. It creates a tonal dissonance as two actors will appear side-by-side in a scene yet operate like they’re in two distinctly different productions. Once again, Wright’s central conceit undermines the thematic heft of the material and the gifts of his incredibly talented ensemble.

 

Yet for all of the film’s water treading, there’s still the joy of Keira Knightley gamely attacking the lead role. Anna Karenina is a part that you requires some work to screw up, and all you really need is a good actress in the part to make it work. Luckily, Wright was smart enough to bring his reoccurring leading lady onboard, wind her up in corsetry, and watch her tackle a stunning array of emotions and scenarios that cover all the bases of her greatest strengths. I’m particularly fond of an emotional breakdown brought on by jealousy, loneliness, resentment towards societal double-standards, and a bit of drink she has late in the film. She swings from manic, desperate highs to twitchy, snarling aggression, stops on a dime, then propels into tear-stained accusations and paranoia. It requires an actress of consummate skill, poise, and strength to manage such stop/start dynamics, but Knightley is one of the strongest working ones around.

 

Besides the refinery of the costumes, the beauty of the production design, the strength of the editing, there’s always Knightley’s strong central performance to recommend this version of Anna Karenina. Wright’s busybody choices as a director may have handicapped much of the final product, but he managed some smart choices along the way.

When I first heard about this project, I thought it became automatically a front-runner for the upcoming Best Picture Academy award. Indeed, after ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Atonement’, it was yet another high profile adaptation of a classic book once again directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley so it seemed at the time rather likely that it would be another critical success. However, eventually, it didn’t get much love when it was released. Well, I finally saw this movie and I must admit that I had a rather hard time to care for the damned thing. First of all, instead of giving us a literal adaptation, they decided to go for a rather theatrical approach which wasn’t necessarily a bad idea, the whole thing was as a result visually quite impressive, but I thought it was eventually rather distracting and, at the end of the day, it didn’t add much to the story. On top of that, to be honest, I wasn’t really familiar with this timeless story but I always find it difficult to care for the so-called difficult and convoluted love life of the aristocrats. Still, it was a decent watch thanks to a really strong cast (Keira Knightley, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jude Law, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly Macdonald, Olivia Williams, Alicia Vikander, Cara Delevingne, Shirley Henderson). To conclude, even though I thought it was rather disappointing, I still think it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre.

Didn't expect it to be that good. Loved the director's theatrical touch. Scenes moving, feelings in the air. Could have been more Russian than Hollywood yet is worth the effort.

The stilyzed and set design conscious direction seems the justification to revisit 'Karenina'more than an choice in itself. But I like the icy train motif and the handsomnest of Bronsky.

A lot like Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare and their works, Leo Tolstoy’s work has been numerously adapted onto the big screen and other various sources over the years, primarily his 1877 Russian novel Anna Karenina. The story has mostly been released as an English-language film as opposed to its origin language – Russian. In 2012, we are given another version of the novel with Keira Knightley in the leading role as she made her third consecutive collaboration with director Joe Wright following Pride And Prejudice in 2005 and Atonement in 2007. Their work together has been all-in-all success but unfortunately, despite that it is decent enough to endure for 2 hours, it did have quite a few missing pieces.


Director Joe Wright has always been a director with maintaining a bold, colourful effect in his films. Regarding Anna Karenina, he blends a very similar style of direction as Baz Luhrmann (in particular Moulin Rouge!) Therefore, in that sense, it focused on establishing a connection between a theatre-based fantasy and the real world dealing with the ups and downs of personal relationships. It is genuinely difficult to blend in those together, especially when it is an adaptation based on a novel in a different language and territory. Quite frankly, Anna Karenina falls into an easily occurred trap. It tended to focus a little too much on the visual appearance, which resulted a serious lack of emotional depth in the story and the attribution to the original source. Therefore, the most important keys had become the second-rate level of importance.


Keira Knightley continues in her costume-drama trademark with Joe Wright as she portrayed young Aristocrat Anna Karenina. You could quite easily establish that Knightley performs in a role that is related too much to Pride And Prejudice and Atonement, but this time, we see a slightly different actress. Finally, at 27 years old, Knightley has transformed from roles as a young girl into a more mature role as a grown woman; more essentially as a mother and a wife with responsibilities. Furthermore, Knightley successfully grasped the essential emotional-breakdown points and gives a good performance. This was not worthy of an Academy Award win for Best Leading Actress but it is still another one for us to remember. Kick-Ass actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson (formerly Aaron Johnson) took on the role of the charming and somewhat irresistible Count Vronsky. Unfortunately, he seems out of place in the entire film, let alone the character he played. He looked way too young and had the approach of a creepy, sexually possessed stalker. Furthermore, the chemistry between Anna and Vronsky was very dry. You’d think it was a woman having a romantic relationship with a teenager. And what was with that moustache? It may have been there to give Taylor-Johnson a manlier, older approach but it still provided a very forced touch for this specific actor to fit into this character.


On the plus side in terms of acting, Matthew MacFayden and Kelly MacDonald delivered solid performances Oblonsky, Anna’s brother, and his wife Dolly. We see different aspects of married relationships in Anna Karenina, but the most fascinating romance is the partial sub-plot between Konstantin Levin (portrayed by Domhnall Gleeson) and Kitty (acted by Alicia Vikander). Over and over in films based in a historical setting, we see love as an arrangement or as a duty but Levin’s feelings for Kitty are true love, and their performances were superb. Finally, there is Jude Law where age is slowly catching up with him as he portrayed Anna’s bitter husband Count Alexei Karenin. Our first impressions of this guy were that he is a very shallow and passionless man who hardly gave his wife the time of day at all. However, we see a traumatised, emotionally confused and occasionally dangerous Alexei. Nevertheless, Jude Law is easily the stand-out of this film.


You could name quite a few number of film adaptations based on books that could not have turned out any better, but almost the entire production of Anna Karenina became a severe blow for it. The fact that it is a British made and performed project set in Russia, based on a Russian novel by a Russian author; it just did not entirely fit. Quite frankly, Anna Karenina could have been as strong as recent historical drama A Royal Affair if the film stuck to its original roots and, therefore, improvised. Still, it was not entirely a bad film as there were still some solid performances and left the audience something to think about.