Should the visual beauty of a film come at the
expense of the emotional depth and character connection? That is the question probably inadvertently
posed by Joe Wright’s 2012 version of Anna
Karenina. A classic tale about a
married woman who succumbs to the affections of another man, Anna Karenina has been adapted numerous
times with a variety of conceptions.
Wright decided to put his on a stage on film with partial success. Despite the big name actors, such as Keira
Knightley and Jude Law, it is almost not worth mentioning them since the
standout players of the film were not the characters but the intricate dance
made of image, set, and sound.
Besides
being stunning to watch, the concept of the characters lives taking place on a
stage did help illuminate and emphasize several symbolic points. The conceit worked best when it was used to
expose a character, when a dark secret truth was being set before society for
judgment. The pounding of the binoculars
and snapping fans and the clumping feet of the horses blurring together
highlight Anna’s extreme reaction to her lover’s fall during a race. Likewise, after being exposed as an
adulteress, Anna attends the ballet to the scorn and horror of society. As her
once friend says “I’d call on her if she’d only broken the law, but she broke
the rules”. That was another aspect that
the staging was able to emphasize: society.
There was a beautiful party scene in which the camera swept through the
dancing glamorous couples to behind the wooden sets, exposing the working men
and women acting as stagehands to the theatrics of the elite.
However,
these elegant machinations came at the price of engaging and enjoyable
characters. Even the characters you
could like have a falseness to them – Levin’s vision of Kitty floating amongst
the clouds, his love illuminating her, is proven wooden and false, the
unpainted back of the clouds gives a sense of unreality and woodenness. It’s a façade and nothing more. As much as
this is a critique of the director’s choice, I cannot deny that the main
characters, Anna, Karenin, and Vroknsky are not the most likeable characters in
and of themselves. Whether that’s the
actors’ faults or just the nature of the story is unclear. With the being said, I have drawn a
conclusion which I had not originally been intending to draw. While normally I
would disdain at a movie that chose artful conceit over character, in this case
it just might have worked. I did not
enjoy the film when I first watched it, yet as it sat with me over the next
week, I began to love it more retrospectively, appreciating it. It was not bad performances or unlikeable
characters that flash in my mind as I think of Anna Karenina, but instead the beautiful dance choreographed with
cameras, sets, sound, and costume that Joe Wright created.
