Anna Karenina
Mr. Wright’s “Anna Karenina” is different. It is risky and ambitious enough to count as an act of artistic hubris, and confident enough to triumph on its own slightly — wonderfully — crazy terms.
Pious Tolstoyans may knit their brows about the stylistic liberties Mr. Wright and the screenwriter, Tom Stoppard, have taken, but surely Tolstoy can withstand (and may indeed benefit from) their playful, passionate rendering of his masterpiece.
The challenge of “Anna Karenina” is that Tolstoy’s loose and baggy monster of a novel is more than large, bigger than great: it is comprehensive. As it glides among its many characters, reading their thoughts and dissecting their desires, the book becomes a vivid panorama of an entire society, you might even say a whole species. “Anna Karenina” does not take place, as movie-trailer voice-overs might say, “in a world” of such and such exotic customs. The book lives in the world, in the busy, contingent present tense of mid-19th-century Imperial Russia, which contained everything Tolstoy knew. To try to reproduce that world according to the canons of 21st-century movie realism would be to diminish and falsify his narrative, which ascends through cultural and social detail into a realm of universal emotion.
Mr. Wright’s brilliant gamble is to arrive at this level of emotional authenticity by way of self-conscious artifice. The cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg are rendered as elaborate stage sets. (Sarah Greenwood is the production designer.) Characters make their way around props, past painted backdrops and through catwalks, ropes and backstage rigging. You get the sense that in these bureaucratic offices, ministerial meetings and aristocratic households, everyday life is a form of theater. To play your part in this intricately hierarchical society you must speak your lines, hit your marks, know your place and beware of improvisation.
But the film itself is the very opposite of stagy. The camera hurtles through the scenery as if in hungry pursuit; the lush colors of the upholstery and the costumes pulsate with feeling; the music (by Dario Marianelli) howls and sighs and the performances are fresh, energetic and alive. Compressing the important events of Tolstoy’s thousand pages into an impressively swift two hours and change, Mr. Wright turns a sweeping epic into a frantic and sublime opera.
Wright's movie is a dazzling affair, a highly stylised treatment of a realistic novel, superbly designed by Sarah Greenwood and edited by Melanie Ann Oliver, with rich photography by Seamus McGarvey, sumptuous costumes by Jacqueline Durran and a highly romantic Tchaikovskian score by Dario Marianelli, all previous Wright collaborators. The theatre stage with its oil lamp footlights is sometimes a real stage with 19th-century flats and sometimes a venue for actual events such as the provincial racecourse where Count Vronsky has his terrible fall. The pit of the auditorium becomes a Moscow ballroom where Anna seduces Vronsky away from Kitty on the dancefloor, an opera house and the St Petersburg council chamber where Karenin conducts his business.
Yet it has to be said that the film is only occasionally touching and rarely truly moving. The death of the wheel-tapper, accidentally trapped under a train, is infinitely more affecting and memorable than Anna's suicide that it is carefully set up to foreshadow. This has something to do with the stylised presentation. Our constant admiration for Wright's virtuosity, initially attractive and exciting, ends up as a major distraction. This kind of extreme theatricality is not necessarily unsuited to cinema, but it should not become a barrier to emotional involvement.
Infidelity, Grandly Staged.
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