An Irresponsible Filming Of A Classic

Leo Tolstoy's ANNA KARENINA is heavy material, quite literally at 864 pages long. There have been many adaptations; although not many that have satisfied people on a large-enough and majestic scale. 1997's adaptation starring Sophie Marceau came very close as it was filmed on location in Russia and featured an international cast. When word came out of Joe Wright, the man behind ATONEMENT and PRIDE & PREJUDICE, being set to direct a new adaptation, there were high hopes of a truly beautiful film with principal pedigree that included Keira Knightley and Jude Law. With today's abilities of scale, design and effects for the screen, this was to be the ultimate adaptation: the one to do what no other could have ever done.

After watching Joe Wright's adaptation of ANNA KARENINA, I had realized I had encountered more of a reference than an ode to Leo Tolstoy's classic novel. It might be watchable to those ignorant of the original literature, although even that is a stretch. Otherwise, this is an insult to the Russian novel.

The choice to entirely use British actors with British accents was not necessarily a bad move. But the choice to use British actors with British accents was annoyingly blunt when in the absence of anything really Russian. The entire film was like a naive attempt to standardize all period settings to that of the formulaic films out of the UK about the British aristocracy. I feel pity for Keira Knightley and Jude Law. They were in no way at fault for this movie. They were let down by it. They shined and should have been in an appropriate film named ANNA KARENINA.

It's a shame that I felt more of a connection to Russia while watching HOT TUBE TIME MACHINE than I did this (remember, they were suspected of being Soviet spies at one point). I mean, in this adaptation the character of Masha is apparently from Bangladesh because a Bengali-language lullaby is sung at one moment by an Indian actress. When did either of those get mentioned by Tolstoy? How would either of those get mentioned in accordance with a story set in Imperial Russia? I guess anything goes when the director's wife shares that Bengali heritage. It's the equivalent of making a 1930's/40's Nazi movie set in Poland and just having all the Jewish victims played by Vietnamese performers singing traditional Vietnamese songs. Heck, why not?

ANNA KARENINA is an overt lesson in style over substance, as if it was made to teach the lesson, because worse yet, the style isn't even pleasant. Too much of the film is purposefully set on a theater stage. It's not as if they shot indoors and meant for the stuff around them to be photo-realistic. Nope, it's literally like watching a play with drawn backdrops and transitions at the mercy of stagehands. This makes no sense: ANNA KARENINA wasn't a stage production, so why bother? Even if it was, why bother? You don't adapt a book by putting the actual text on the screen to be read. The pageantry and grandiose scale, which should come from a novel nearly 900 pages long, is entirely lost. Some relief is made when we are transported to actual exterior locations, but those moments are few and short. To further beat the dead idea of luxurious scale, something that looks like a model train chugs down a curve of the track in the Russian countryside like a cartoon.

Then at times the camera itself becomes a stage dancer, whipping around at a pace that, when coupled with the music, gives you a headache. The ballroom scene early on is an example. Within its context, the movie is designed beautifully, but the context of a stage is all wrong. It's one thing to admire landscape paintings sequentially down a hallway and say that they're beautiful every time. It's entirely another thing to watch them at 24 frames/second for over two hours.

The people behind this movie took the idiom, "bending over backwards to do something," the wrong way when making this film.