Film: Anna Karenina

Director: Joe Wright
Genre: Drama
Source: UK (2012)
Rating: R
Location/Format: Blu-Ray
Grade: B

A few things I've learned about Joe Wright: He likes adapting classic literature, he likes visual flair, and he likes Keira Knightley. Those three things all come together in his visually lush adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. The film doesn't always work, but I admire Wright's ambition and the creativity of the approach.

Wright approaches the film with one central conceit culled from the novel: Russian society is like a performance, whereas the country life is "real." He presents this idea in a visually rich but slightly heavy-handed metaphor. Certainly this undercurrent is running all through the book, but I think Wright doesn't realize that for it to fully work he has to allow our "country" people to be developed a little more. Levin, our point of entrance into the agrarian lifestyle is a central figure in the novel, probably taking up as much book space as the titular character herself. In Wright's version, however, Levin is barely present for more than a few scenes. I can make sense of the choice--Anna's story is not only much better known, but much sexier as well: romance, infidelity, tortured soul--that's the soap opera and the bang, and so Wright understandably focuses his energy in trying to make Anna a three-dimesnional figure. He is moderately successful, but he does so at the expense of the other characters. So much is cut from the novel that, though the story holds together, it doesn't have the depth or richness of Tolstoy's epic work.

Visually, the film is pretty stunning. The drama of high society literally becomes a stage show, with actors moving between the cramped backstage and the lush, visually elaborate stage itself. It mostly works, though at times one wonders whether it's worth the effort and choreography such a choice requires. Wright does well with it, but one almost senses that he's reaching into Baz Luhrmann's bag of tricks a little too often, as though he doesn't trust the material itself to tell a compelling story. That's silly, of course.

Still, it's fun to watch. Knightley is always fairly strong with Wright, and Jude Law and the supporting cast is equally capable. It's not the best adaptation I've seen in the past few months, but it's certainly the most ambitious, and for that I can't help but applaud. The film is visually overwhelming--sometimes too cluttered--but it also presents the material in a way the stage or the page could not. And that's pretty cool. 

Alternate Film Title: "In Pre-Soviet Russia, Train Rides You!"