Eyebrows
were raised when Universal revealed the poster for its new take on Tolstoy’s much-filmed
tragic romance Anna Karenina, showing
Keira Knightley’s Anna waltzing with Kick-Ass
boytoy Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Vronsky before vast carvings of the heroine’s
initials. In retrospect, this seems less a PR campaign than a serving of
notice. Joe Wright’s bold new version is the text as Peter Greenaway might have
filmed it, playing out on elaborate theatrical sets which are redressed and
reordered as required; but it’s also Tolstoy as produced by Working Title,
which means it has the budget to push the experimentation yet further, and
indulge the pirouetting camera and spectacle-for-spectacle’s-sake we saw the
first stirrings of in Wright’s Atonement.
To say this is a bumpy ride would be an understatement, but it may stand as the
mainstream’s most radical rethink of the costume drama since The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
The
trains that pass through the source material have been hijacked by Wright and
writer Tom Stoppard to serve as a remorseless means of time travel, allowing a
director to cut from one zone of this set to another, his heroine to pass from
a husband to her lover, and for Russia to speed away from its imperial past
towards a revolutionary future. The steam they generate looks pretty, but their
pistons are jolting and deadly, crushing more than one individual beneath their
wheels. To transport us, any such film needs actors capable of ushering us past
the heavy conceptual baggage on the luggage racks – who convince as more than
actors-playing-actors. It gets some of these: Matthew McFadyen is unusually
awake and puckish as Oblonsky; Domnhall Gleeson’s Levin toils soulfully in the
fields; and Jude Law nails the quiet, seething hurt of the betrayed Alexei.
Crucially,
this Karenina has Keira K., lending a patina of old-school movie glamour that
helps one overlook some of the film’s failings. Knightley remains, perhaps, on
the young side for the role, but she’s never been shot more adoringly or
persuasively. It was Wright who first showed us the spirit of curiosity and
self-improvement that lights up this actress’s beauty in the Austen adaptation;
Anna Karenina is the film that
reveals Knightley almost as those old von Sternberg melodramas did Marlene
Dietrich, as a performer with the ability to switch something on and to look
exactly as the film needs her to look, moment by moment, in order to sweep the
viewer along with it. The same can’t, alas, be said for Johnson, whose blonde
perm leaves him looking like Rudi Völler, and us wondering what Anna might see
in this Vronsky, beyond ready access to a stack of Modern Talking LPs.
Not
all of the film’s gambles pay off, then. It’s arguably a lively gloss on
Tolstoy, rather than Tolstoy itself, interested in mood and motion over
character or emotion; when Wright goes for the tragedy, abandoning his previous
devices 45 minutes before the end, it becomes markedly less interesting as a
film. But let’s give the filmmakers credit for taking those gambles in the
first place, and for seeking to do something so nakedly unusual within the
corset-like constraints of period drama; what that large audience who swooned
over Pride & Prejudice and Atonement will make of it remains very
much to be seen.
Anna Karenina opens nationwide today.
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