Exit
BOUT HALFWAY
THROUGH Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina,
the narrator becomes so
omniscient he enters the mind of a
dog, as her master orders her down
the wrong hunting path. “‘Well, if
that’s what he wants, I’ll do it, but
I can’t answer for myself now,’ she
thought. She scented nothing now;
she could only see and hear, without understanding anything.”
It’s the most extreme example of
how much the near 1,000-page epic
internalizes—most of the novel is
spent winding through the inner recesses of one character after anoth-
LAURIE SPARHAM/COPYRIGHT FOCUS FEATURES
A
FILM
er’s thoughts, and second thoughts.
The dog’s experience here—a fruitless exercise that favors the eyes
and ears over the mind—is not unlike watching Joe Wright’s film adaptation of Anna Karenina. Rather
than try to engage with its characters’ complexities, it busies itself
with visual distractions that splinter off in every direction, save one
that leads to a point.
The distractions begin and end
with Wright’s unconventional decision to set Anna Karenina and
Count Vronsky’s forbidden affair
on a stage, instead of St. Petersburg
and Moscow. “Just as the Russian
aristocracy could be described as
living on a stage, our story unfolds
in a dilapidated theater,” he ex-
HUFFINGTON
11.11.12
Alicia
Vikander and
Domhnall
Gleeson shine
as Kitty and
Levin in Anna
Karenina’s
sweeter,
secondary
love story.