Director Joe Wright made a mistake in filming Anna Karenina like a play, says Bob Ellis, although the result was still extremely good.
IT MAY have been Stoppard who beguiled Joe Wright into filming Anna Karenina like a play; or a half-play-half-movie in the vaudeville-pier-end style of Oh What A Lovely War. Or it may have been Joe in an ego-tempest of self-love attempting to upstage Tolstoy as Baz and Benedict and Barrie do with Shakespeare on this faraway, fatal shore every year or so.
It was a bad idea, and I nearly left, but was glad I stayed.
For it was, in most other, regards near perfect. There will never be as good an Anna as Knightley, nor as exquisite a widow’s black veil through which she beweeps with large, brimming eyes her outcast state. Nor as great, truly great, a Karenin as Jude Law: bearded, wispy-bald, pale-eyed, spectacled, pious, punishing, self-punishing, racked with guilt and unstifled love and puritan resentment of that love, he inhabits the role with the moral force of a Smoktunovsky or Scofield or Spacey. There will be no better reading, I think, of this role ever, nor better dialogue, cutting like a shark’s fin through the story’s dark waters, showing what adultery was then, and the cost of it; and aristocracy; and duty; and the burden of one’s good name. In the doleful red-headed Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) we see hints of Chekhov’s Astrov, a sympathiser with the serfs, scything hay beside them and forfending like Lenin the end of everything.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Count Vronsky, Anna’s impetuous high-born lover, is a bit of a worry. He seems too insipid, shallow, youthful and narcissistic to pierce through Anna’s marital carapace so readily — but such men do, I guess, and have. For me, the role belonged to Dan Stevens of Downton Abbey, but what would I know. He is a fine actor, though, and that vital thing, his Russianness, is not in doubt.
It’s in a theatre, much of it, and in the wings and the dressing rooms and the stage machinery; and at one point a horse-race, with real horses, flashes past the footlights, and it feels like the Ascot Race number in My Fair Lady and you wonder why nobody is bursting into song. And … there’s a ballroom scene in an auditorium too small for it, and a parliament scene in an auditorium too small for it, and at one point an entire theatre full of meadow-grass, clogging up the aisles … And for most of the time the train is a toy train …
And it’s a pity. Always the directorial ‘vision’ is jostling with Tolstoy, one of the world’s greatest novelists, and with Stoppard, one of the world’s greatest dramatists, and you know it’s a contest he won’t win …
But it works, in an odd way. And you come out purged and wiser, as Aristotle recommended. And although the ‘auteur’ (what a silly concept that is on this particular occasion) has loftily sacrificed box office takings of somewhere north of six hundred million dollars, preferring twenty or thirty, he got his way.
