Anna Karenina (2012, R)

First things first – I’ve never even come close to reading Anna Karenina, so I have no idea how this movie is as an adaptation.  I found the story to be fine but unremarkable – I think maybe I’m just not a Russian classics person.  While it’s a perfectly serviceable narrative, I couldn’t really connect with it.  However, purely as a film, I have huge admiration for it.

The Anna Karenina of the title is an aristocrat from 19^th-century St. Petersburg – faithful wife, devoted mother, and caring sister.  When she travels to Moscow (her philandering brother needs help convincing his wife to forgive him,) her fate is sealed by an encounter with the passionate Count Vronsky.  One meeting is enough for her to captivate him, and he ardently pursues an affair with her.  Anna’s better judgment gives way to her desire, and she risks everything for her dashing lover.  It’s a tale of forbidden fruit, societal pressure and judgment, and the possibility of forgiveness.

Once again, I haven’t read Anna Karenina, so I don’t know how much dialogue was lifted and how much was invented by the glorious Tom Stoppard, but the script offers plenty to feast on.  I also don’t know how much to thank Stoppard, versus director Joe Wright, for the striking use of theatrical imagery and staging.  My money’s on Stoppard for the concept, because drawing attention to the fourth-wall framework of his story is totally up his alley; either way, Wright executes it stunningly.

The film, without any explanation why, unfolds largely as a play.  It opens with the curtains coming up on a stage, on which much of the action is performed.  The story follows the actors into the wings and up to the flies, and some of it is placed in a more concrete real world, occasionally augmented by blatantly false backdrops or confetti snowflakes.  The extras move in time, carefully choreographed, and when Anna dresses, she does so balletically.  There are a number of onscreen set changes, and sometimes the real world mentioned above makes its way onto the stage (such as a field of grass adorning the floorboards.)  I’m not entirely sure why the film is made this way – my best bet is that it’s a metaphor for the fishbowl of the gossiping Russian aristo society, in which people’s lives are little more than spectacle for others to observe – but it’s gorgeous, audacious, gripping.  I’ve seen tons and tons of costume dramas, but not one of them looks like this.

Keira Knightley, Jude Law, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson (soon to be Quicksilver in The Avengers) all deliver in the lead roles.  Knightley’s Anna is messy but sympathetic as a woman on the verge of tearing down her world, Law’s Karenin is equal parts determined ignorance, furious judgment, and quiet compassion, and Taylor-Johnson’s Vronsky is every bit the smoldering conquistador.  The film also features Matthew Macfadyen, the sublime Kelly Macdonald, Ruth Wilson (a former Jane Eyre,) Michelle Dockery from Downton Abbey, Emily Watson, Emerald Fennell from Call the Midwife, former Weasley sibling Domhall Gleeson, and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bit role from Luke Newberry (Kieren from In the Flesh.)

Warnings

Sexual content (including several artfully-shot sex scenes) and a few scenes of violence.