Films don’t come more glamorous than this.
Tolstoy’s romantic tragedy has been filmed many times before, with stars such as Greta Garbo, Vivien Leigh and Sophie Marceau, but it has never looked lovelier. Nor has Anna.
Keira Knightley, when lit like this, is a screen goddess. Joe Wright is the director who also made her look stunning in Pride and Prejudice and Atonement. Maybe she should always work with him.
As her paramour Count Vronsky, Aaron Taylor-Johnson (the renamed Aaron Johnson who starred in Nowhere Boy and Kick Ass) is attractive too, even if he’s blond and pretty rather than, as Tolstoy described him, dark and dangerous.
Perfectly laundered and ramrod stiff with a tangible air of entitlement, he’s as much a military love object as Terence Stamp was in Far From The Madding Crowd. You won’t see a better-looking couple.
The story of their adulterous love affair is as exquisitely framed as a Vogue fashion shoot – and as unmoving.
This Anna is vain and petulant, rather than a liberated woman ahead of her time, and Vronsky seems a good deal more in love with himself than with her. He’s a toyboy, not the mature man in his 30s who Tolstoy described.
Jude Law, excellent as Anna’s wronged husband, a socially aware cove who serves as a government minister, is infinitely more sympathetic – a long way from Tolstoy’s intention when he wrote the novel and fell in love with his own leading lady.
Another problem is that the two subplots are more touching than the main one.
The pursuit of Princess Kitty (Alicia Vikander) by idealistic farmer Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) is sweet and unaffected.
And Kelly Macdonald steals the movie with a heartwrenching performance as Dolly, a woman unhappily married to Anna’s brother Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen), an unfaithful man who underestimates his wife.
The most affecting moment in the film is when Dolly confides to Anna that Dolly admires her rather than regards her as a fallen woman: ‘I wish I’d done the same, but no one asked me.’
Read more:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2198460/Anna-Karenina-review-Keira-Knightleys-new-movie-exquisite-look-lacks-emotion.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
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