Exit
unfaithful in its own way.”
Wright’s Anna stars Keira
Knightley in the titular role: a highsociety woman who leaves behind
her beloved nine-year-old child and
unloved husband (a well-cast Jude
Law) for a younger man, Count
Vronsky (a miscast Aaron TaylorJohnson). It marks Wright’s third
collaboration with Knightley, beginning with 2005’s refreshingly wellpaced Pride & Prejudice. Knightley
looks the part as Anna—dark mess
of curls, flickering eyes and elusive
charm—but feels more an approximation of her. The more revelatory
performances come from the supporting cast. Matthew MacFayden,
who played Darcy to Knightley’s
Elizabeth in Pride & Prejudice, delights as her gregarious brother,
Oblonsky. And Wright’s inclusion
of Levin and Kitty—the novel’s secondary love story, oft-overlooked in
film—elicits two of the film’s most
genuine character interpretations.
One of Wright’s more astute
choices was in not casting Anna
and Vronsky’s story as one of epic
love, as it has been in previous tellings. Tolstoy’s novel is realistic
fiction, and his lovers—stuck in a
lustful, unhealthy codependency—
suffer for it. The problem, then,
comes in Wright’s surface treat-
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ment of their relationship. With
little explanation of how Anna’s
life regresses with Vronsky—as he
maintains his social cachet, and
she is increasingly ostracized—the
cause of her slide into depression is
hopelessly confused.
As Tolstoy reminds us often in
Anna, even so-called surface issues—lust, jealousy, selfishness—
have depth. Wright is keenly aware
of this. “... The tradition of realism
Every movie adaptation
of Anna Karenina is
unfaithful in its own way.”
is too obsessed with the surface of
things, and what I find so engaging
in Tolstoy’s novels are the twists
and turns in the landscape of the
characters’ minds,” he told the
New York Times. “I wanted to find
a form of expression that was more
capable of conveying that sort of
experience.”
But Wright’s interpretation feels
more like an earnest attempt to
justify remaking a film that’s been
done at least 11 times before him.
The result is an Anna you must
follow mindlessly, without
understanding anything.