Joe Wright’s adaptation of Anna Karenina is so bold and audacious its bold audacity becomes the story, rather than the actual story itself. This is both a strength — it is always visually dazzling, inventive and surprising — and a weakness, as it is so goddamn distracting. The entire action, more or less, is set in an old decaying theatre beneath a proscenium arch with its own backstage, balconies and rat runs, and an origami-ish ability to fold in on itself, or fold out on itself to become ballroom or bedroom, and even horse-race track. According to Wright, this makes sense as high society in Tsarist Russia was all about performance, and fakery — their whole world was truly a stage — but it is also mise en scène gone totally mental. Whether you will like this Anna will, I think, depend on whether you can admire such imagination at the expense of what this film lacks: true feeling.
Although the set is the star of this film, along with the magnificently silky confections that are the frocks, the actors do well enough, in the circumstances. This is Wright’s third outing with his favourite leading lady, Keira Knightley (she also starred in his Atonement and Pride and Prejudice), and although the poor old thing always gets it in the neck (she acts with her teeth, is the general complaint), she is a luminous Anna. The camera loves her, whatever, and she raises her game here. No one in Tolstoy’s great, sweeping epic is one thing or the other. They are all emotionally complex, and Miss Knightley’s Anna is alternately noble and ridiculous, humble and haughty, spirited and dispirited, admirable and irritating. Her hair also goes from fabulously coiffured to scarily witchy, which is also an interesting journey to follow.
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