Joe Wright’s (Atonement, Hanna) new film version of Leo Tolstoy’s oft-adapted, and once scandalous story, Anna Karenina, sets itself apart from the crowd by changing up the setting and getting a little experimental. This time around Anna (Keira Knightley), her disputes with her husband Aleksei (Jude Law), and her affair with the dashing Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), are mostly set inside of a Russian theater. Homes and workplaces blend in with the stage and realist depictions of human interactions suddenly turn into choreographed affairs that resemble a stage musical. Basically, this is all an excuse for Wright to show off how stylishly he can present well-worn material. And, if this Anna Karenina has anything going for it, it’s that it looks really pretty.
The problem is that this is generally all the film has going for it. The set-based scenes that seem to take place both on the stage and in the real world sometimes give way to scenes set in the country, and suddenly we no longer feel claustrophobic. The world opens up and grand expanses of outdoor scenery fill the screen. It seems like it’s supposed to be some sort of commentary about how high society is fake, just a performance, and real truth only comes from getting away from social pressures and getting out to the woods—like “Walden” or something. The problem is, the places Wright uses his stylish effects aren’t consistent. The scenes where regular action devolves into being on a theater’s stage eventually start popping up in a more random fashion than anything, and eventually we even get the majesty of nature encroaching on the indoors. What at first feels like it could be an interesting experiment ultimately reveals itself to be no more than artifice.
For their part, the cast that Wright has assembled are generally very strong, with one big exception. Most of the drama in this story comes from the fact that Anna falls in love with a dashing stranger, and eventually her passion becomes so much that she decides to throw away her husband, her child, and her entire life to indulge herself in an affair. But here, when the dashing stranger is being played by a milquetoast void of charisma like Taylor-Johnson, the whole conceit just rings completely false. There’s no light in this guy’s eyes. He seems to be making no choices as a performer whatsoever. He robotically reads his lines with the same blank look on his face throughout the whole film, and we’re supposed to buy the fact that he’s wrecking lives. It didn’t work for me. And I’m not really enamored with all of the white people problems exaggerated into end of the world scenarios that come from this era of literature in the first place. Were a whole chunk of history’s greatest thinkers really only concerned with who was sleeping with who?
