NOVEMBER 19, 2012
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The novel was published in the mid-1870s, but how old is Anna Karenina herself? The book places her around 28, though the husband, Karenin, is 20 years her senior. There was a film in 1935, with Garbo, who was 30 at the time, and Basil Rathbone as Karenin, when he was 42. That’s a fair gap, but what was better still, those two seemed to have aged and grown bitter in their marriage. There was another version, in 1948, with Vivien Leigh (35) and Ralph Richardson, who was 46.
This time, we have Keira Knightley, 27, and Jude Law, who is 40. Law wears receding hair as Karenin and he tries to move stiffly and give an impersonation of a dry bureaucrat. But Jude Law is always going to seem mischievous, I suspect, and Keira Knightley is, if nothing else (and that case is open), a bright-eyed babe. As her Anna Karenina opens in theatres, she is appearing topless on the cover of Allure magazine. Despite her outstanding and courageous work in A Dangerous Method, and her promise in one or two other films, Allure may be a more natural habitat for her than Tolstoy.
So the indefatigable picture business has attempted Anna Karenina once more, no matter that it has been filmed a dozen times already, proving how easily a great novel can feel like a novelette when put on the screen for a couple of hours. Sir Tom Stoppard has been hired in for the adaptation this time, and he has done what every screenwriter has had to do in the past—cut out miles of Tolstoy. But Sir Tom is a respectable literary figure, so he has done his best by the Levin-Kitty story, even if many viewers will be asking why the film keeps edging away to this uninteresting pair and putting them in natural surroundings, instead of maintaining director Joe Wright’s concept-heavy scheme of having the vicious, corrupt but very well-dressed Russian high society on stage most of the time.
This Anna is the most atrocious because it is far and away the most afflicted by what Gogol and Nabokov called “poshlost”—an empty straining for vulgar effect. The idea of filming many scenes as if they were on stage is a dire gimmick that amply illustrates Wright’s own comment, when asked why some of his films (Atonement, say) had had long tracking shots: “Basically I like showing off.” There was a time when the tracking shot was a thing of beauty and meaning—I am thinking of Max Ophuls, Anthony Mann, Kenji Mizoguchi, Michelangelo Antonioni—but for Wright it has been a way of crying, “Look at me! I’m directing.” Wright likes to underline his every effect; he goes for bizarre angles because he dreads boredom, or ordinariness; he has the sensibility of a man most at home making commercials (Wright has collaborated with Knightley on some Chanel ads). The staginess is mannered, tiresome and a way of distracting us from the absence of that essential passion that turns Anna from being a regular member of society to a maddened self-destructive.
In his novel, Tolstoy never lost his grasp of a decent bourgeois woman, supposedly well placed as wife and mother, who notices somewhere close to 30 the pale flame that has seldom warmed her. It’s acceptable for Anna to be beautiful, but her first blush of youth has gone, to say nothing of young hopes. She has had a child; she endures an unrewarding marriage in a moribund society—in the novel, of course, Levin and Kitty are vital because of the alternative life and society they are trying to make. Anna has to be of a mood that feels the downhill slope ahead. She is sad, a little tired and depressed, and on the point of discovering her own sense of doom. That’s what the death of the railway track worker is meant to uncover in her—and it’s a scene Wright covers in far too much hurry.
Actual age is not as important as the level of palpable experience. Garbo and Leigh were both childless when they did their Anna, but they had a weight of experience that was just beginning to edge their famous beauty with foreboding. I know little of Keira Knightley’s life, but onscreen she is dazzlingly pretty and cockahoop. Why not? She is supposedly one of the best-paid actresses in the world. We have all learned to spell her name. She is on the cover of Allure! She gets to do Anna Karenina way before she is ready—if she ever will be. But probably her name was crucial in funding this picture, though in all the money spent, no one has sought to get her voice to stop oddly drifting between South Kensington and Battersea. That voice is as untidy as her dresses are immaculate.
Who might it have been? Well, I never asked anyone to do another Anna Karenina, and I have little hope of there ever being an adequate adaptation. Isn’t that what books are for? Still I can think of actresses available who might have been more convincing and touching: Marion Cotillard, Claire Danes, Rachel Weisz, etc. Actresses who have got past the pleasure of looking happy and bright and successful.
But I have not mentioned the gravest shortcoming of this attempt: Vronsky. This must be a man who has lived enough to be masking despair in womanizing. Don’t tell me the movie business doesn’t know that type. He needs to have a hard sexual edge, and a cynical worldliness that is still swept away by Anna. They need chemistry and helpless impulse. Sean Bean once played the role (with Sophie Marceau as Anna), and Garbo had Fredric March as her Vronsky, just a year or two away from his fatalistic Norman Maine in A Star is Born. As if aware that Knightley seems very young, Wright found a Vronsky who is just 22-years-old: Aaron Taylor-Johnson. He is more pretty than handsome, fair-haired with a mustache that seems to have required all his creative energy. Try as he might, the actor can’t escape the aura of a dead-eyed cad. We never feel he cares for Anna or knows that he must abandon her.
Without the emotional guts of the novel, Stoppard and Wright have done the only thing they can think of. They presume that Anna has never had good sex. That’s a reasonable enough assumption, but the sun-drenched naked scenes are so stylized and pretty (and so hard to see as collaborative acts) they have no heat or ugliness. (Anna and Vronsky shouldn’t be simply rhapsodic when they get it on.) There’s one shot where Anna comes (I think), but if you’re going to be bound by the notion that movies have to be visual, and do the sex that Tolstoy would never have dreamed of doing, you might as well take a hint from Allure, and let Keira be Keira.
So can we somehow make a bargain with the film world: no more Anna Kareninas? You’re making idiots of yourselves.
8 comments
Again. Mr. David Thomson is sophomoric. Begins with the irrelevant and ends with the unnecessary. I do hope the new regime at TNR is not promoting him as a new film critic for the publication. That would be sad.
- mjhill
November 20, 2012 at 1:45am
I've seen several movie versions of Anna Karenina (just tonight I saw the 1948 Vivian Leigh-Kieron Moore version) and none of them come close to the 10-episode 1977 PBS production (which I own). The production values are second-rate and the color is weak, but the chemistry between the characters and the acting are superb. And at over 8 hours there is enough time to fully develop all the relationships that inhabit a Tolstoy saga. In the 1948 version, e.g., the relationship between Kitty and Levin is covered in two short scenes, but it is a major sub-plot in the novel, because the Levin character is based on Tolstoy's own life as he saw it. In the PBS version Nicola Pagett as Anna and Stuart Wilson as Vronsky are exquisitely matched, even when heatedly arguing. And Eric Portman is Karenin himself in his prissy pandering to his social image. I recently saw a trailer of the Keira Knightley version, where she's declaring her love for Vronsky, and the only thing I noticed was the prominence of her teeth. No chemistry at all with that frail dandy sporting a wispy mustache and beard. A DOA scene. You can watch the PBS version for $1.99 an episode at this instant-video address: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=anna+karenina+pbs&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Aanna+karenina+pbs&ajr=0 The film quality here may be better than on the video I own. Check it out.
- magboy47.
November 20, 2012 at 2:33am
Thomson brings three essential gifts to the arena, he knows his movies, he writes well, and he's opinionated. Think Agee, Ebert, Kael, Reed, Turan, Farber, & a host of other birds of that judgmental feather. Another Thomson virtue, he changes his mind. He's always learning. Of course one man's masterpiece is another's rubbish. Just saw Holy Motors, one of the worst, most tedious films ever, and that includes El Topo. Out of curiosity, I looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes. 91% favorable. Jeez. One of the acute 9% described his Holy Motors viewing experience as like watching a dog chase its tail. Dan
- dbuck1
November 20, 2012 at 7:42am
I would agree with magboy. The BBC productions of the great books have always taken the time to reflect the qualities and intricacies of the novels they dramatize. I am not a great fan of Anna Karenina though perhaps I should be. It is said that Tolstoy, when he set out to create her character, described her as plump, rosy and sensuous but that he fell in love with her as he continued to spend time with her and thus the world got Anna Karenina rather than an expanded version of Helene Kuragina. All Kareninas have been somewhat zaftig, or at least bosomy so I'm wondering at this choice of the rather flat-chested Keira Knightley to play her. But then Keira was also picked to play Elizabeth Bennet whom she played as if she were some giddy pretty ill-dressed teenager with some promise of a brain but not much that could explain Darcy's smouldering desire for her. Nothing like the sexy, exuberant, witty and too intelligent for her own good Elizabeth that Austen created. There is something about Keira that directors wish to work with. Maybe it is that scene in "Atonement" were she dives into a fountain and emerges from it dripping of water, or the green dress in the library. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWPZDi723Eo It would be interesting to go see the film if only for the pleasure of counting its errors and foibles.
- Noga
November 20, 2012 at 10:19am
There are some pieces of literature that can't be done in a 2-hour format but need the long format of a mini-series to fully explore the material, characters and richness of the source or at least a 3 1/2 hr version to do some justice. The problem with Keira Knightley is that she has already played various version of Anna in other period pieces and she acts them in much the same way. Tedious, on the verge of crying and lots of close-ups of Keira's face and mouth. Imagine if David Lean had shot Dr. Zhivago or Lawrence of Arabia in a 2hr version. Or the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice had been done in 3 episodes instead. There are some works of literature that deserve the attention to film length and require the attention of the audience for more than 90 minutes.
- singlspeed
November 20, 2012 at 10:54am
Good piquant post from Noga1, especially on Knightley as E.B. And another good post from Magboy, kid's firing bullseyes lately. I've got the Vivian Leigh Karenina on tape to watch at my leisure and my wife inevitably will soon drag me to see the Knightley one. But the serialized Karenina I didn't know of and I will want to check that out and get me some.
- basman
November 20, 2012 at 1:22pm
Just saw the Vivien Leigh Karenina last night -- she's great, as was Ralph Richardson, but the movie was overstuffed to within an inch of its life and Kieron Moore was a dud as Vronsky (he got better as the years went on , although the budgets got lower pretty quickly). Sean Bean and Sophie Marceau were better, but the best film of this material is STILL the 1935 movie with Garbo and March and Rathbone. As Thomson noted, Garbo and Rathbone's scenes together give the sense of two people who married mostly because somebody's parents thought it would be a good idea and they've had to live with the consequences, and March suggests weakness and despair and other unhealthy impulses. Heck, Freddy Bartholomew is close to heartbreaking as little Sergei. I still can't get over the fact that the grand suicide-by-steam-train scene was shot in Glendale -- no doubt near where Mildred Pierce was selling her pies and fried chickens . . .
- lump516
November 20, 2012 at 1:54pm
Ah Nicola Pagett ... Twenty-odd years ago, I saw my first episode of "Upstairs, Downstairs" around the same time as I was reading Morton's "Nervous Splendour". I fell in love with Nicola Pagett, and decided to turn the book into a movie, with Pagett as its star (even though by then, she was too old for the role of Baroness Vetsera). (I am still pretending that the travesty "Maerling" was never made.) Pagett would have been the perfect Vetsera: doomed vivacious beauty ... and of course the BBC version of Anna Kareninain a sense proved it. What can I say, the woman is Goddess of Forlorn Sensuality. I can't stand either Sean Bean or Sophie Marceau, so that version of it did not talk to me at all. The mention of Dr. Zhivago above pointed to a whole new and, sadly, unexplored possibility: Steiger and Christie as Karenin and Wife? I liked this line in the review: "He is more pretty than handsome, fair-haired with a mustache that seems to have required all his creative energy." Then again, composing it seems to have required all of the critic's creative faculties, for it was followed by the following asinine admonition: "So can we somehow make a bargain with the film world: no more Anna Kareninas? You’re making idiots of yourselves." Say what? It's like saying we should shut down future productions of Turandot because no one does Nessun Dorma better than Pavarotti. Silliness and Tosh. Give us more classics not less. Eventually, they will get it right. The only question is, who will be the next Nicola Pagett? My screenplay, when it is written, will need a Vetsera.
- icarus-r
November 20, 2012 at 3:19pm