As I said in my post of September 7, I had great hope for
the new movie version of Anna Karenina.
Though I don’t ever expect a movie to replicate the experience of
reading the book, that doesn’t mean good adaptations can’t be made.
Anna Karenina with Keira Knightley gets off to a
great start. The pacing is quick, like
the novel’s. There are touches of humor,
as in the bureaucrats stamping their papers in unison and Levin’s awkward lack
of urban finish. The foreshadowing is
nice but not overdone; Anna’s son is shown playing with a model train, for
example. And everyone is whistling,
humming, carrying the jaunty and very Russian tune of Tchaikovsky’s 4th
Symphony. A lot of these masterful
touches are facilitated by the smart and interesting choice to film the story
as if it’s taking place in a theater.
This also underscores how “on stage” Russian society made people to be,
a fact which becomes part of Anna’s undoing.
So here again, the movie is true to the book without representing
absolutely everything exactly as Tolstoy has it. The cast, too, is really wonderful, and they
nail their characters throughout.
But, after this fantastic beginning,
