Who Needs Actors?

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.