Whatever faults Tom Stoppard may possess as a screenwriter and Joe Wright as a director, timidity cannot be counted among them. Their collaboration in bringing Tolstoy’s imposing Anna Karenina to the big screen is one of real audacity: even on the rare occasions it falters, you have to applaud the ambition.
Between them, Wright and Stoppard have filleted and condensed this doorstep of a novel into two hours of screen time, fashioning it into a swirling, swoony, achingly romantic tragedy. Stoppard’s witty conceit is to present the story of doomed heroine Anna literally as a piece of theatre, played out beneath a proscenium arch with its own backstage, curtain and audience. But magically and playfully, Wright’s cameras open up the confines of the stage to expansive, exterior vistas. It’s dazzling to watch.
All this is accomplished while keeping the sweep of the novel and its diverse themes just about intact. With Shakespeare in Love, Stoppard showed a flair for teasing the earnest reverence accorded to literary giants; unsurprisingly he doesn’t tiptoe around Tolstoy. It’s a shrewd instinct. After all, Anna Karenina was originally published in instalments, complete with what we now call cliff-hangers – its melodramatic aspects are never totally absent.
Keira Knightley, who seems forever doomed to be sniped at by people more obsessed by celebrity values than acting skill, is a fine Anna – alternately charming, haughty, and dispirited. She raises her game under Wright’s direction, as her work in Atonement and Pride and Prejudice have already confirmed.
In an all-British cast, Matthew MacFadyen stands out as Anna’s randy, insouciant brother Oblonsky, while Jude Law pleasingly reins himself in as her husband Karenin – a dull, virtuous public man.
READ MORE: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/9512044/Keira-Knightley-in-Anna-Karenina-review.html
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