Climb on board for a gorgeous, risky take on the classic Russian novel, writes DONALD CLARKE
IT IS, WE TRUST, not giving too much away to say that Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina has a great deal to do with trains. That vehicle offers us an irresistible metaphor for Joe Wright’s risky, gorgeous, unsentimental take on the most psychologically alert of 19th-century novels. If you chose to climb on board, you will be carried along at enjoyable pace. If you fail to make it into the carriage, you will feel furious, excluded and confused. In short, the picture is set to divide opinion.
For all the archness on display, this Anna Karenina feels as emotionally sincere as any previous adaptation. It helps that Wright has cast the film with such care and imagination. Keira Knightley, always at her best for this director, doesn’t have the greatest range – the two octaves run from fragile to neurotic – but, when safely within those confines, she is capable of eating the screen raw.
Knightley does very nicely as the Russian enigma, wife to a boring technocrat, who embarks on a ruinous affair with a glamorous but insubstantial army officer and brings social Armageddon crashing round her ears.
It says something about the odd progress of Jude Law’s career that, rather than appearing as Vronsky, the suave lover, he finds himself excelling as Anna’s flawed, oily, unattractive husband. One of the year’s key cinematic images will surely turn out to involve Alexei Karenin’s near-religious cradling of a rudimentary reusable prophylactic.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson is callow as Vronsky. Matthew Macfadyen’s is hilariously bluff as Anna’s brother. Purists may argue that Domhnall Gleeson is a little slight to play Levin (an unmistakable version of the young Tolstoy) but our busiest actor makes a touchingly fleshy naïf of the idealistic young landowner. Far from being a stray subplot, Levin’s adventures form the moral spine of Tolstoy’s panoramic story.
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