Jan 15, 2013

Anna Karenina (2012): Muddled Russia.


Leo Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina, is a simple story: a love triangle that ends badly. How he got nine hundred pages out of it, I don’t know. I’ve never read the book. I’ve tried, but it is my Everest. (I’d say it’s my Moby Dick, but Moby Dick is my Moby Dick.) I’ve seen two movie versions of it, however, and, as far as I can tell, they’re no substitute. You would think one of the world’s great love stories would make a hell of a movie, yet the current one, directed by Joe Wright, is only hell. Why?                                                                                             

          First, casting: Anna has to be beautiful. Here’s where Wright gets it completely right. Keira Knightley is so beautiful that she even looks good through a veil. But he blows Vronsky (so to speak.) Count Vronsky must be 
so dashing and physically attractive that Anna, a respectable wife and mother, is overwhelmed with passion at the very sight of him. Yet, the actor he chose, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, looks like Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein. Karenin, Anna’s husband, must be formidable and Jude Law does his best, but he’s made up to look like an accountant for Rasputin & Co.                                                         

Then, the conflict. Every drama must have it and Anna Karenina, both the character and the story, is rippling with it. Conflict between Anna and her husband, her society and within herself. All of which is intensified by being a woman in nineteenth century Russian society. Upper class, no less. In this version, it’s all underplayed. Karenin frowns and threatens, opera-goers sneer and the only indication of inner conflict is Anna’s early shunning of Vronsky and later embrace of morphine (in a bottle, by the way, big enough to stun the entire Russian army.) Nothing about her gender. Don’t think we’re supposed to assume that, either. (It’s very difficult to claim that without looking like you’re making excuses.) Mr. Wright, though, isn’t done with the Russian upper class. Not yet. That brings us to the theater.                        

The movie begins in a theater as if all the action will take place on stage. It doesn’t – and that’s a problem. The director has claimed that “theater” is a symbol for the artificial, restrictive and over-determined nature of high society in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Not a bad idea, but let’s give it a haircut. Suppose, instead of a theater, we compare society to a doll’s house. Hey, didn’t Henrik Ibsen write a play about that? Yeah. And he didn’t show a doll’s house! Going back to the theater, however, it doesn’t function as a frame for this story or the background or even a theme. In Wright’s Anna Karenina, it’s merely an interruption. Doubly a shame because he already has a powerful symbol that can serve all those functions, but neglects it:
dancing.                         
           Nineteenth Century beau monde, like dancing, depends on shared knowledge for smooth functioning. Everyone must know all the steps and do them exactly in time to the music. If as little as one person is out of step, ugliness and conflict results. Yet what does Joe Wright do with the fancy dress balls in his film? He catches their spectacle, but not their meaning.What about the scene where Anna Karenina dances in a black dress while everyone else is wearing white? Subtle. Makes you wonder what he’d do with Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. Not that you can’t shoot the same scene effectively. I’m thinking of another film based on an epic novel of love and death in the eighteen sixties. A beautiful and decidedly independent heroine shocks the local nabobs by the dancing in a black dress. In the case of Scarlet O’Hara, her widow’s weeds.                                                                      

You don’t have to go as far afield as Atlanta, Georgia or back to 1939 to see how well similar material can be handled. Elvira Madigan (1967) tells the story of a beautiful, Danish circus performer and her tragic love affair with a handsome cavalry officer. True, it’s no Gone With The Wind, but a lot of people can’t hear Mozart’s 21st Piano Concerto without thinking of that movie.          

The 1935 film of Anna Karenina is no masterpiece, either, but it looks like one in comparison. It reduces Tolstoy’s nine hundred pages to a brisk ninety minutes, but not a single one is wasted. It moves like a train (so to speak) from beginning to end.  Greta Garbo burns white-hot without losing any of her iciness and Frederick March is va-va voomsky. An even bigger irony, however, is that the screenwriter of the current Anna Karenina, Tom Stoppard, shares a name with . . . he is? Never mind.

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