Anna Karenina

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A sweeping drama about love and desire, compromise and adultery, social mores and self-realization, Leo Tolstoy's masterpiece of realist fiction has been adapted for the screen more than a dozen times. Yet it is safe to say that it has never before been realized with anything close to the imaginative brio of this latest incarnation from British director Joe Wright. With a script by playwright and Academy Award®–winning screenwriter Tom Stoppard, glorious production design by Sarah Greenwood and a stunning performance by Keira Knightley (collaborating with Wright for the third time) in the title role, this Anna Karenina is both a faithful rendering of Tolstoy's novel and a brilliant piece of conceptually audacious showmanship. The chief stylistic conceit of Wright's Anna Karenina is that our heroine's tragic destiny unfolds almost entirely within the confines of an old, majestic theatre. Though changing backgrounds signal the story's shifting locations, as in the theatre we are constantly aware of the fact that everything is happening within a single space. Wright leaves the artifice exposed, letting us view the chorus as they change the sets. This strategy recalls the Brechtian transparency of Lars von Trier's Dogville, but on a far more opulent scale. The result is a feeling of claustrophobia, of walls closing in — feelings not unlike those which befall Anna as she negotiates her unhappy marriage and unsustainable affair. The lives of the Russian aristocracy become a buzzing hive, with the public and the private separated by only the thinnest of veils. All the world's a stage, indeed. Yet for all that, Anna Karenina remains exactly the kind of story in which everyone can lose themselves. As Anna, Knightley once again proves herself one of the most emotionally flexible actors working today, while Aaron Taylor-Johnson is arresting as Count Vronsky, the object of Anna's desire. But no one will surprise you more than Jude Law as Alexei Karenin, Anna's husband. Alexei's humble appearance and demeanour are the opposite of the charismatic star parts we associate with Law. Like everyone and everything in Anna Karenina, Law is donning a mask, assuming a voice, putting on a show — but beneath these various fictions is deep, overwhelming emotion. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPGLRO3fZnQ&hd=1

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