Anna Karenina Movie Download

2 / 10

An Experiment Gone Pretentiously Wrong
Dreadful screen adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s magnificent novel.

Director Joe Wright, who made the very good “Pride and Prejudice” and the very forgettable “Atonement,” turns Tolstoy’s novel into an incoherent mess. It’s as if he stood over Baz Luhrmann’s shoulder and decided that he was going to try to direct a film just like him. The problems with that are 1.) Luhrmann is a terrible director and should be emulated by no one and 2.) His style is completely wrong for “Anna Karenina” anyway.

For some reason, Wright decides to stage the entire film as if it’s a play in a run-down theatre, so actors sit on purposely artificial sets and we see them moving through the wings as they get ready to make their entrances. I get it, I get it. The Russian aristocracy was a study in theatricality and Wright wants to play up its superficiality. Which may have been fine as a framing device for the film, but he carries it through the entire thing until it becomes tedious. He also has his actors mug and mince around like they’re performing broad music-hall comedy, a style of acting that is not only incongruous with the source material but doesn’t even make sense within the context of the film as written (the screenplay is by Tom Stoppard).

But the worst thing about this “Anna Karenina” is the casting, which — aside from Jude Law, who isn’t exactly well cast as Anna’s husband but is a good enough actor to pull it off — doesn’t get a single thing right. If Keira Knightley isn’t a disaster as Anna, it’s only because she’s not a powerful enough screen presence to be a disaster. Her jutting jaw and gritted teeth have never been filmed to less flattering effect; and this is the character who’s supposed to walk into a ball and command the entire room without even trying to. Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Vronsky looks like an actor from a gay porn film, and acts fey enough throughout the film to be in one (Vronsky would never hold a cigarette like that!) He sidles through the film like a boy in a high school play trying to look virile without understanding what virile means. Matthew MacFadyen is thanklessly cast as Stiva and plays him like a buffoon. And Domhnall Gleeson is Levin, a character who should be powerful looking and outdoorsy, but as cast here instead looks like he should be sitting in a student cafe writing editorials about Communism.

Defenders of the film have said that there’s no point in making yet another version of “Anna Karenina” if the filmmakers are just going to make yet one more faithful version of it, which I actually agree with. I’m not opposed to experimenting with the classics. I just think this particular experiment goes wildly and pretentiously wrong.

Grade: DRead More