The Stage and Real World Collide in "Anna Karenina"

This review was originally published in 2012. Except for cleaning up spelling errors, it is presented as it was originally published.

For me, “Anna Karenina” is one of the greatest books of all time. Many people would agree with me. In fact, Time Magazine went so far as to call Leo Tolstoy's Russian epic nothing less than the greatest novel ever written. I'd agree with that, but then one of my Harry Potter books would have to be demoted, and I'm too sentimental to let that happen. Over the years, there have been tons of movie adaptations of the book while adults force… no, encourage kids to read it in high school. Now we are getting a new adaptation of the book for film with director Joe Wright at the helm, who made great films from Jane Austen and Ian McEwan books (“Pride & Prejudice” and “Atonement,” respectively)—so why not Tolstoy?

The thing is, Wright manages to make his adaptation very bizarre. Or should I say interesting? I suppose some people would say experimental. You'll pretty much understand why the term is so confusing within the first few minutes of the film, where curtains on a stage rise and our story begins. Rather than make this a typical costume period drama, Wright has opted instead to film “Anna Karenina” like a theatrical production. There is little to no attempt to hide that this is a stage environment, though since it is a movie, the acting is more subtle than you would normally get with a live play. This actually presented a surreal motion picture experience for me.

See, I saw this movie in a classic theater that had one screen and tons of seats—there were even tiers in this theater. To say that my surroundings matched the stage feeling on the screen made the film feel eerie and exciting at the same time. It almost felt like I was watching a stage play come to life, and the results were much better than I expected! Granted, I know lots of people won't feel this way. They'll see obvious sets and decorations and wonder why the surroundings don't look like typical computer-generated backgrounds.

This goes back to the dilemma I find in modern films, where the more real computer graphics try to look, the more fake they feel. Here, everything looks fake, but feels real. I can't explain why that is… it just is. By now, I've spent the whole time discussing the setting of the film rather than the story. That's because the story is about as good as we've seen it in other film adaptations, but not substantially more so. It helps that it has established actors like Jude Law and Keira Knightley (as the title character) in the film, but I don't think they do a substantially better job in these roles than other actors have. Joe Wright's “Anna Karenina” is more of an experiment than it is a standard movie, and it's up to you to decide if it works or not.