Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina – An expensive experiment, Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina (2012) fails on all levels.  This is puzzling because the film’s pedigree is impeccable – it has A-list stars (Keira Knightley and Jude Law) and was written by Tom Stoppard.  But just about everything about the project is wrong, beginning with Vronsky.  I haven’t read Tolstoy’s novel and so I can’t comment on how that character is portrayed in the book.  But in the movie, Vronsky looks disconcertingly like Eric Idle – he has a vaguely bemused look of befuddlement on his face and you expect him to trip over his shoelaces or fall on his face like Stan Laurel on a bad day.  The movie Vronsky’s moustache seems either pasted to his face or, alternatively, strangely wispy.  When he crashes his horse, you feel sorry for the animal but your reaction is “of course” – in fact, you’re surprised this dude was able to mount the horse in the first place.  And, as far as mounting goes, the sex scenes between Anna and Vronsky are completely ludicrous, shot as tangles of heaving limbs in the best late sixties or early seventies style.  Unfortunately, several of those scenes resolve in medium shots of the entwined pair:  Vronksy’s skin is completely pallid and slug-like, but Knightley, a movie star, has, apparently, gone to a tan spa – her limbs and thighs are all impeccably burnished.  This is the sort of fundamental blunder that is profoundly irritating – didn’t anyone look at the finished movie and wonder why it was that Knightley’s skin is so perfectly tanned while the soldier and outdoorsman Vronsky is as a pale as a lily?  The mistake tells us something about movie stars and about vanity, but nothing about the subject of the movie.  The film is wholly wrongheaded in all respects.  Wright imagines the action as taking place on an immense, Piranesi-like, opera stage – the backgrounds and choreography of extras is all stylized, theatrical.  Characters stroll between elaborate painted sets and, when they are required to visit slums or the ghetto, the action takes place in the attic of the theater or its cellar.  Sometimes, as in Olivier’s Henry V, the camera glides through an open doorway into a real landscape – the audience breathes a sigh of relief – but, then, soon, too soon, we have fallen through a hidden trapdoor and are back in the claustrophobic rooms within rooms of the stage-set.  This is a clever idea and worked-out with Baz Luhrman style exuberance (and heavy breathing) but the effect seems to me completely alien to Tolstoy.  Everything in Tolstoy, even the most absurd coincidences, is presented as completely natural, common-sensical, logical, and rational.  But everything in the movie is overlit, hysterical, wildly operatic and melodramatic – this simply makes no sense at all, except as some kind of weird exercise in performing Tolstoy in a fashion as completely non-Tolstoyan as possible.  The film has other bizarre errors – in one important scene, Vronsky who always looks, more or less, ridiculous is made to court Anna wearing something like a Miracle Whip container around his neck; this correlates to a scene in which poor Mrs. Karenina has to prance around wearing a cage-like bustle.  In the ballroom scenes, the actors make bizarre and annoying hand-gestures simulating flight or digital masturbation – I have no idea what was intended – but the effect is grotesque.  The failures in the film are epitomized in an episode in which Levin is made to speak in Tolstoy’s authentic voice, attacking the follies of Reason – but no one in the film has been shown to act according to Reason and the speech comes from nowhere and leads to nothing at all.