Directed by:
Joe WrightScreenplay:
Tom StoppardCinematography:
Seamus McGarveyComposer:
Dario MarianelliCast:
Keira Knightley, Jude Law, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Kelly Macdonald, Matthew Macfadyen, Alexandra Roach, Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, Emily Watson (more)VOD (2)
Plots(1)
A famous legend surrounding the creation of Anna Karenina tells us that Tolstoy began writing a cautionary tale about adultery and ended up falling in love with his magnificent heroine. It is rare to find a reader of the book who doesn’t experience the same kind of emotional upheaval. Anna Karenina is filled with major and minor characters who exist in their own right and fully embody their mid-nineteenth-century Russian milieu, but it still belongs entirely to the woman whose name it bears, whose portrait is one of the truest ever made by a writer. (official distributor synopsis)
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Reviews (10)
A beautifully made, pointless thing. Really, even though I can appreciate the way the film is made, in a theatre backstage, this approach doesn’t bring any added value. Actually, I thought it was counterproductive, because the loud unrealism distracted me from the characters, which means that Anna Karenina missed me completely on an emotional level – with the minor exception of sowing hatred towards the protagonist.
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Joe Wright experiments instead of sticking to the concept of a subtle and rhythmic whirlwind of emotions like in Atonement. This theatrical attempt of his doesn't have the right grace, and thanks to the varying pace and the overall bland tuning of the film, it's boring in the finale, even with Keira Knightley giving a great performance – if it weren't for her, it would be mediocre. The fateful novel could have been used "the old-fashioned way" about 100 times better.
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Fortunately, this is not a heavy-handed adaptation of a heavy-handed novel. Thanks to Joe Wright, Anna Karenina is a stunningly playful piece of work, which takes the most important things from the subject, never bores for a minute and, at least for the first half, makes the viewer watch all the visual inventiveness with a smile. The acting performances, led by Keira Knightley and Jude Law, are without a single flaw (Vronský has always struck me as very sleazy, so I actually welcomed the unsympathetic dummy), the costumes, the sets, the music... Everything's perfect. Lots of literally unforgettable scenes that I definitely want to see again.
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Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy is one of the most respected novelists of realist Russia, and "Anna Karenina" is one of his most well-known novels. It is a extensive work that has been adapted into a more or less two-hour film. When comparing it to the slender "Hobbit" which is stretched into three films totaling at least nine hours, I wonder where the mistake was made. Where Jackson has to set up the story by adding new plotlines or stretching unimportant passages, the creators of the last film based on the novel "Anna Karenina" had to cut back on the story. And so, the plot is minimal. It is quite sad, but that's how it is. Everything takes place in a screenwriting shortcut, with only the most important moments being left, which then revolve around the characters of Anna and Vronsky. These two have the spotlight in the first half, and Karenin comes to the foreground in the second half. The other characters are not extras, but their importance to the story is limited and temporary. The story of Princess Kitty and Levin or Oblonsky and his wife are outlined, but they are just side episodes that do not have such an impact on the fate of the main character. What disappointed me the most, however, was the lavishness of the film. I expected a grand drama with beautiful costumes and sets, but all I got were the costumes. The story otherwise takes place on a theater stage, there is a curtain, there are ropes, everything. The effect is mainly that the film looks cheap. If this approach was chosen to show that Russian aristocracy was truly just a theater, cut off from the real world, existing on its own rules that don't have much in common with reality, I understand the intention, but I simply didn't imagine "Anna Karenina" this way, and I don't think this concept of the film helped significantly. More: http://www.filmovy-denik.cz/2012/12/sherrybaby-lets-dance-unesena.html
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Joe Wright won me over with his phenomenal film adaptations of Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, so I was counting on Anna Karenina to be another film that would fully immerse me and transport me with its atmosphere to the time in which the story takes place. Unfortunately, I have to say that this time it didn't happen. The original approach to the film's space, which is largely set in a theatre, seems very imaginative at first glance, no question about it. But the great novel (story) that "Anna Karenina" undoubtedly is is very much harmed by the confinement between four "bare" walls, not to mention the way the sets and props look (the use of a model train, I don't know why, irritated me quite a bit). As for the cast, at times I felt that some of the actors didn't take their roles too seriously (maybe a connection to the theatre, who knows), which was a bit annoying. In short, this film was quite a disappointment for me, which is all the more so considering the director's previous efforts.
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