Joe Wright (2012)

A theatre curtain, announcing ‘Imperial Russia 1874’ then giving the film’s title, rises.  This recalls the start of Les enfants du paradis and much of what follows in Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina takes place in a theatre – stage, auditorium and elsewhere.  This can’t be a comment on the way that twenty-first century audiences are likely to perceive Tolstoy’s story.   The novel isn’t about the theatre and (although there have been a small number of stage adaptations) only opera or ballet lovers are likely to associate Anna Karenina with the theatre.  Those who know it without having read the novel are more likely to have seen earlier cinema versions (excluding an American TV movie of 1985, Joe Wright’s film is the sixth in English and the eleventh in all) or television (including the underrated BBC serialisation of 1977 with Nicola Pagett as Anna, Eric Porter as Karenin and Stuart Wilson as Vronsky).  It seems that Joe Wright and, presumably, Tom Stoppard, who wrote this adaptation, mean to show that wealthy St Petersburg and Moscow society in the late nineteenth century was all about performance, about people playing the parts in which life had cast them and not departing from the script.  This doesn’t seem an original take on a period piece but there is some interest in wondering how the film-makers will carry it through.

What makes Anna Karenina 2012 such a lousy film is that they don’t.   Wright uses the theatre settings only when they suit.  When there’s an outdoor scene that won’t have much impact as a stage set and he can get prettier pictures shooting outdoors, that’s what he does.   It could be argued that, when Wright shows Levin and the peasants haymaking alfresco, he is contrasting the wholesome honesty of their lives with the artificiality and duplicity of Russian big city society but that hardly explains why Count Oblonsky’s grouse shooting also happens in the good fresh air.  When, however, there’s an outdoor episode which it seems can’t be contained within the theatrical frame, Wright goes for the impossible so that the audience can admire his daring.  The most conspicuous example is the horse race which ends with the death of Vronsky’s mare Frou-Frou.  This onstage routine is like a grotesque extension of the stylised Royal Ascot number in My Fair Lady.  The railway sequences are a baffling mixture of the real thing, a stage set and a model train chugging through painted countryside.   Joe Wright’s credo as a filmmaker appears to be:  if it’s visual it’s cinematic even if it’s nonsensical.  The only kind of plausibility most of this Anna Karenina has is that of a filmed record of a tricksy stage adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel.

Wright’s treatment of the story is not only incoherent:  he doesn’t seem to realise the consequences of his approach.  The theatrical framing is an alienation device – it confers an irreality on the proceedings, which means that Jude Law’s supple and intelligent playing of Karenin, which is naturalistically convincing, is fighting a losing though valiant battle.  It’s typical of the film that Karenin’s cracking of his fingers, a repeated habit which works so powerfully on Anna’s nerves in the novel, occurs only once – with a close-up on his hands behind his back.   This occurs at a critical point of the breakdown of their marriage:  when Karenin asks Anna what she wants, she screams back that she just wants him to stop cracking his fingers even though he’s only just started doing so.  Tolstoy’s scene of Anna’s social humiliation at the opera is retained but although the staging is exaggerated and melodramatic its impact here is seriously undermined by the incomparably more florid horse racing sequence before the same audience in the same setting.

The most damaging effect of the fancy artifice is its cruel exposure of the limitations of Keira Knightley as Anna and Aaron Taylor-Johnson (as he now calls himself) as Vronsky.  If you’re going to suggest that life in St Petersburg and Moscow is a form of puppet theatre, but one in which real people suffer extremes of joy and misery, it’s surely crucial that your actors transcend the artificiality of their setting and their own outward appearances.  Knightley and Taylor-Johnson are passionless lovers.  Joe Wright has them snog and strip every so often but this doesn’t help – the director’s pictorialising tendencies turn their artfully entwined naked flesh into art history rather than drama.  Aaron Taylor-Johnson, styled to look like the Nutcracker Prince, is less expressive than the wooden version – his performance is an embarrassment.   Knightley is nowhere near as bad; as usual, she wears her clothes beautifully, she tries hard and she’s effective in moments when she fuses Anna’s frustration and immaturity.  But her emotional range is limited and her determined intensity is mostly hollow.  I’m not being facetious when I say that, noticing her on a television advert as I wrote this note, I found her more fascinating to watch for a few seconds selling Chanel than interpreting Anna Karenina for two hours.  Keira Knightley is being tipped for an Oscar nomination for this movie.  This is a pretty good joke but one hopes it won’t be an award-winning one.

The vocal colour and histrionic energy that Matthew Macfadyen brings to the role of Oblonsky is a surprise and very welcome in this pallid company (even though Jude Law is right to colour Karenin in various shades of grey, some of them sympathetic).  Domhnall Gleeson as Levin and Alicia Vikander as Kitty have more going on between them than the leads do; although that’s damning with faint praise, Gleeson and Vikander at least bring warmth with the potential of heat to their love and marriage.  Levin is a difficult character to bring to life on film – the philosophical questioning and self-questioning that’s absorbing on the pages of the novel risks making him a bore if he keeps spouting it on screen.  It’s not surprising that Stoppard has cut ninety-nine percent of it.  Gleeson’s portrait isn’t persuasive.  His underplaying is often inexpressive and he looks like a peasant to start with, which dilutes the radicalism of the life Levin chooses – yet this is an actor you want to see again.   Emily Watson has some force as the morally censorious Countess Lydia.  The cast also includes Ruth Wilson as Princess Betsy, Kelly Macdonald as Dolly, and Olivia Williams as Countess Vronskaya.  The beloved Serioja is played by a boy called Oskar McNamara and his relationship with his mother is as weightless as the one between her and Vronsky.   The conventional high-passion lushness of Dario Marianelli’s score is at odds with most of what appears on screen but it serves its purpose:  this is a film that badly needs musical reminders of what you should be feeling.

13 September 2012