Runtime: 2 hours, 10 minutes
Rating: R
Director: Joe Wright
Quick Impressions:
In college I took The Russian Novel as an elective because I already loved Crime and Punishment and The Adolescent. We read Dead Souls, Fathers and Sons, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, and some short stories. Our professor loved Dostoevsky and gave fascinating lectures. Class met once a week, and I read all the novels the weekend before, so I could hand them off to my best friend down the hall who didn’t want to buy them and threatened not to take the class with me anymore unless I continued this arrangement.
Apparently, this Russian novel emersion had a very adverse effect on my behavior since my roommate complained that it was making me paranoid, tormented, and needlessly dramatic. Often, I’d sneak away into the woods in the middle of the night just to have an anguished crisis of the soul. (It was also pretty draining just in terms of the reading requirements since I was also taking three other English classes, philosophy, and astronomy that semester.) (When you decide to squeeze in an extra class, it’s probably best not to make that sixth class The Russian Novel.) On the bright side, it did give me three hours a week away from my roommate since for some reason, we’d decided to take all five classes together. Of course, since spending every weekend reading a Russian novel was bringing all of my internal melodrama to the surface, my roommate soon discovered that three hours a week away from me were not nearly enough.
Anyway…
I just wanted to provide some context for the statement I’m about to make.
I prefer Dostoevsky to Tolstoy. It’s more than that. I emphatically love Dostoevsky. He’s probably my favorite novelist after Dickens. And Tolstoy just leaves me cold. It’s like I’m Anna, and he’s Karenin. (Except it’s not really like that if you push the analogy at all, which only drives home the point that I don’t really relate to his work.)
Don’t get me wrong, I definitely enjoy hearing colorful anecdotes about Tolstoy’s personal life, but I’ve never connected with his fiction. (Keep in mind, though, that I’ve only read Anna Karenina and bits and pieces of things.)
I feel like Dostoevsky is so much more accessible. He writes about things that are more universal and relatable. Tolstoy writes about a closed world that I don’t feel I belong to. It seems like people of all ages can understand Dostoevsky, whereas, you must have experienced rather specific things to appreciate Tolstoy. Maybe I should read Anna Karenina again now that I’m older, married, a mother. Maybe I should take a crack at War and Peace and hope for good things.
Of course, maybe Dostoevsky’s characters just seem more relatable than Tolstoy’s to me because I’m kind of crazy and far more likely to commit murder than adultery.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t hate the novel Anna Karenina. I just don’t sympathize with—or even understand—Anna. I have always liked the Levin/Kitty storyline and found the Oblonskys enjoyable comic relief. (I realize the characters are not there just as a joke or something, but Anna’s story is so tragic and grand that their (troubled) domestic comedy seems refreshingly light by comparison.)
Because I’ve been hearing praise and Oscar buzz for Keira Knightley, I hoped that perhaps on screen, Anna would seem more sympathetic to me. But, contrary to my expectations, she seems less sympathetic than ever, and that seems to be a deliberate choice by the filmmakers, leaving me to wonder if Tolstoy intends Anna to be sympathetic at all. To be honest, the main thing I took away from the movie is that I don’t understand Anna Karenina. I am sure that it is saying something more than I am getting from it. And maybe I’m just being intellectually lazy. Maybe if I read the book again tomorrow, I would see something more that I have before.
The Good:
The presentation of the story is brilliant (if initially off-putting) and daring. Tom Stoppard (famous for being Tom Stoppard) definitely deserves a nomination for Adapted Screenplay. What an adaptation! For one thing, he crams all of Anna Karenina (or, anyway, the highlights reel) into 2 hours and 10 minutes.
The device of presenting the story as a play being acted on the stage makes it possible to pack so many character arcs into such a short time frame without losing the audience. If you go for realism, you have to waste time providing physical transitions between important scenes and showing establishing shots of new locations. But on stage, two actors may have a conversation on one portion of the stage while the crew prepares a darkened portion for future activity. One key moment can give way immediately to the next key moment with a transition as simple as a character turning around, or someone quickly changing clothes, or the lights coming up on a new area at the same instant as the go down on the previous scene.
Reality drags. Let’s face it. Performance is much quicker.
In reality, rumors spread slowly and in subtle ways. Realism would require twenty minutes of whispers, stolen glances, and affronted noises to communicate the fact that, say, people are watching Anna and Vronsky. But when things can be stylized as if they are being performed on stage, subtlety goes out the window. In two seconds, we see that everybody is staring at Anna, and everyone else in the room is silent. In this movie, secondary characters often behave like members of a Greek chorus, just flat out telling us the same types of things that we would have to read between the lines and do some detective work to figure out for ourselves in a more realistic setting.
Of course, the most amazing thing the film does is make the visual comparison between the artifice of the enclosed stage and the artifice of Russian society. Everything in Anna’s life with Karenin is stale, rehearsed, and mechanical. Life in Moscow is like a pageant being enacted on a stage. People wear elaborate costumes and must stick to their own parts. Nothing is real, yet actors must never deviate from their scripted roles. The audience is watching.
Meanwhile, the scenes related to passion, to nature, to human connection, to the soul take place off the stage, in organic, real-world locations. Much of Levin’s central epiphany is communicated to the reader through visual cues that over time make a very powerful impression, and unlike the book (or my recollection of it), the movie stretches out this notion over the course of the entire film, so you’re left with a story that seems more agreeably balanced.
From start to finish, the film does a tremendous job of communicating the symbolism in the novel through methods suitable to its new medium. I love the connection made by the sound of the horse galloping, the heart beating, the train. Some things that are subtle in the book seem coaxed out more explicitly, but in an artful way, not a heavy-handed one.
Not for any one moment, but for bringing out all of the qualities I’ve just discussed, Tom Stoppard definitely deserves a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Anna Karenina also has a lovely and catchy score by Dario Marianelli. Predictably, its costumes are also gorgeous, particularly when filled by Keira Knightley. The sets looks beautiful, as well.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment (Jude Law):
Jude Law is suddenly doing something very right. Even though he’s always been pretty and at times he’s been almost comically prolific—remember that one year, he was in like fifteen movies?—he’s never impressed me too much with his acting before. (I’m not saying
that he’s a bad actor, mind you. I particularly liked Enemy at the Gates. I’ve just never thought of him as a great actor.) But he’s definitely doing something right here because his was my favorite performance in the movie, and Karenin is definitely not the most charismatic character in the book. (I remember him mainly as silence and
absence.)
In the film, he’s so cold, so distant, so formal, so dull, and yet so very likable. How is he pulling that off? (I’ll admit that it helps that Anna is so hard to sympathize with.) I thought Law was fantastic during the horse racing scene and its aftermath in the carriage. I would have listened to him.
So many people are trying to squeeze into Supporting Actor this year. I don’t know if Law has a shot, but I wouldn’t be disappointed to see him in the category.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment (Keira Knightley):
When reading the novel in college, I found Anna inscrutable in the extreme. I thought the movie might give us more clues about why she starts down her life-changing path in the first place. But it really doesn’t. (I mean, “Why?” is a question I can sort of
cobble together an answer to, but the bigger question for me is, “Why now?”)
When reading the book, though, I never really thought of Anna as crazy. She just seemed bafflingly selfish and perversely self-destructive. (You know, if you’re aware that you have strong, volatile emotions, perhaps you’d better get used to waiting until they pass before making huge life decisions. Maybe when you get the overpowering urge to do something you can’t take back, you should wait for the feeling to go away and reserve action for a time when you feel more clear-headed. Just do something else. Read a Russian novel. Run around crying in the woods for a few hours. If you’re the only person who can see the trap you’re in, perhaps you’re actually free.) In the book, Anna’s deliberate thoughtlessness and selfishness was so off-putting to me that sometimes I didn’t even want to try to understand her (though in the end, I always kept crawling back, trying in vain to understand her).
But she didn’t really strike me as mentally ill. In this movie, though, Anna seems vaguely bipolar. She also definitely seems to be suffering from extreme post partum depression (which didn’t occur to me when I read the book, or, if it did, I’d forgotten).
The movie doesn’t make Anna any easier to understand, though, and, if anything, it makes her even harder to sympathize with. I actually think the one (rather unfortunate) flaw in the amazing screenplay is that the character of Anna is extremely underwritten. We really don’t know what’s making her tick exactly. (And now I’m wondering if Tolstoy never intended us to sympathize with Anna. Do you call that a flaw if it’s actually a quality of the book the screenwriter is bringing out in the film?)
Yes, society is so hypocritical and unfair and fake and suffocating, but that doesn’t change the fact that Anna seems to have no impulse control or ability to reason. When she first showed up in the book, the character seemed aloof to me. But in this version, she’s like a big train wreck right from the beginning.
Given how little she’s given to work with, Keira Knightley does give an amazing performance. Best Actress is a strange category this year. (It’s seemed wide open for so long, but suddenly, there’s a tidal wave of people pouring in to fill it up.) Maybe Knightley will get nominated. But she’s not as good here as she was in Pride and Prejudice, and it’s not really her fault. Everything that we do see going on with Anna, we are able to appreciate because of the performance of Keira Knightley. She gets all the credit for making the character interesting at all. But I think such a high caliber performance deserves better material. She does her best with what she’s given, though, and everything good about the character is what Knightley brings to it.
The scene when she’s chasing her son through the hedge maze, then runs into her husband unexpectedly is nicely played and one of her strongest without being over-the-top.
Funniest Scene/Best
Joke: Nobody else in the theater laughed, but when Anna explained to Karenin that she’d wanted his forgiveness when she was dying, my husband and I both laughed out loud.
Best Scene:
I liked the part with Frou-Frou. It’s so intense, and everything comes together in that instant.
The Supporting Cast:
The casting in this movie really made me smile. I mean, obviously Joe Wright (who also directed Pride and Prejudice and Atonement) enjoys working with Keira Knightley (or is a masochist), so her inclusion is a given. But now, Jude Law—who notoriously had an affair with the nanny that broke up his impending marriage—as Karenin? Aaron Taylor-Johnston—the star of Kick Ass who raised eyebrows by marrying the much older director of Kick Ass whom some deemed an unsuitable match for him—as Vronsky?
Matthew Macfadyen is perfect as Oblonsky. He plays him just the way I always imagined the character. And I love Kelly Macdonald. She’s good in everything, and she’s actually in everything nowadays, so that works out. I liked Olivia Williams, too, but she didn’t have much to do, really. Alicia Vikander is fine as Kitty, and Domhnall Gleeson (who turns out to be the son of Brendan Gleeson) makes a very convincing Levin.
The Negatives:
I’ve already complained about Anna. I don’t know if it’s something that the movie’s doing wrong or right, but her character is just very hard to understand. In the book, she seemed mysterious to me. In the movie, she just seems increasingly deranged. There’s less mystery. It seems pretty clear that she has some kind of medical problem. Maybe on the cutting room floor, there’s a scene of her sustaining a severe brain injury when Vronsky twirls her and lets go during their first dance together. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against passion, and I’m not immune to it. But even putting aside questions like, “Doesn’t she ever think of how her behavior will affect others like her husband and son?” and “Doesn’t she ever think of how her behavior will affect her?”, there’s still the problem of, “Doesn’t she ever think?” Her passion with Vronsky seems to make her giddy, unhinged, physically ill. It’s a bizarre situation. Karenin—though apparently not acting maliciously—gives her just enough rope to hang herself. I really think Movie Anna needs psychiatric
help—or else the help of a good script doctor who can make her character’s behavior more realistic and relatable.
I also don’t think Aaron Taylor-Johnson is right for the part of Vronsky. When I saw the previews, I thought, “He doesn’t look very attractive.” But then I reminded myself, “You don’t like Vronsky, anyway.” But it’s more than that. He just doesn’t seem strong enough, charismatic enough to play Vronsky. (Of course, it’s possible that in the book, Vronsky seems older to me because I imagine him as a dashing military man, when, really, like so many dashing military men before him, he is actually a mere boy. It’s been at least ten years since I read the book, so my impressions of the character could be off.) I liked
Taylor-Johnson in Kick Ass, but Jude Law outshines him thoroughly here and makes Karenin a far more appealing choice than Vronsky, even based on charm and charisma.
This is not good since Law’s Karenin is hardly what you’d call warm and charming.
Another problem with the film is that its greatest strength—the way the visuals mimic the themes—is also a weakness. The device of the “stage play” distances the audience. Initially, it’s quite off-putting. And while it’s great for introducing all the necessary characters and moving the story along at a brisk but intelligible pace, it’s not so great at encouraging the audience to suspend disbelief and get emotionally invested in the characters.
Overall:
Anna Karenina is well and artfully done. Tom Stoppard wrote a most unusual screenplay, and this novel approach makes cramming the entire story into a two-hour film work as nothing else could. Central themes and symbolic elements of the book emerge even more clearly through the film’s strong visuals and innovative use of sound and space.
I do wish the film had more heart, though. Sometimes the high-concept presentation style hinders the audience’s desire to believe in the reality of the characters and to make emotional connections with them. Conversely, Anna needs to use her brain occasionally and not let her passions so overwhelm her reason. Instead of seeming more sympathetic in person, she just seems more bafflingly unstable. Still, if you like Tolstoy, the novel, Keira Knightley, Joe Wright, Jude Law, Tom Stoppard, or high-concept costume drama, you might as well go see Anna Karenina. There’s plenty to like.