Anna Karenina
Director: Joe Wright
Starring: Keira Knightley, Jude Law, Aaron Taylor-Johnson.
Reviewed by Ben Carey.

[rating: 3.5/5]

Joe Wright’s love affair with Keira Knightley continues in Anna Karenina, having begun in Pride & Prejudice and continued in Atonement. Keira Knightley, it seems, is the go to woman for a period piece drama. I’ve liked Keira Knightley ever since The Phantom Menace (yeah, look it up); she was great in Bend It Like Beckham and the first Pirates of the Caribbean, she was also a staple of the fantastic rom-com Love Actually. Now she has taken on perhaps one of the more difficult roles of her career in Anna Karenina, one of the most famous ‘fallen women’ in literature.

Its 1874, the twilight of the Russian empire, Anna (Knightley), the wife of an important Russian politician, Karenin (Law), travels to Moscow to visit her brother and his wife. Whilst in Moscow Anna is drawn ever closer to the company of Count Vronsky (Taylor-Johnson), whom she shares a secret and adulterous past with. Anna’s husband maintains that her feelings and actions are of her concern only; however, the Russian high-society is far more brutal on her, scrutinizing her every move.

First and foremost, this film is a fantastic technical achievement. There are some fantastic theatre-esq techniques which are used consistently from the very first scene, such as changing backdrops between scenes. I also really liked the technique of freezing the scene but having Anna walk through it normally. It really places a great emphasis on her and her emotions/actions. One of my favourite of these scenes was when Anna and Vronsky are dancing in the hall; all of the other dancers are frozen in place but as Anna and Vronksy dance past them they unfreeze and continue dancing, it’s very fluid and well executed. There were also a few scenes where the audio was intentionally rhythmic, one in fields with workers cutting grass, and one in an office with workers stamping forms. I really liked the second one because it actually criticized the monotony of bureaucracy in a clever and artistic fashion.

I thought the piece was well acted, but over-acted. I really liked the strong and mostly silent presence of Jude Law, and for the most part I did enjoy Knightley’s portrayal of Karenina. This film treads the fine line between stylized drama and melodrama from start to finish and I do believe it falters at some point along the way. The first half of the film is very good, but the second half fell apart for me. I thought it was far too melodramatic, which is not to say that Anna’s plight does not call for drama, I just don’t feel it was handled in the best way possible. I think a film which features one or two scenes of intense drama and emotion is far more effective than one that flaunts it in every second scene. I also lost all sympathy for Anna around the halfway mark, and while a shift in sympathy was most likely intentional, I don’t think being devoid of all sympathy for the main character was ever Wright’s intention.

All in all, this is a very beautiful, technically brilliant film. But it is also quite long and very melodramatic. Perhaps this is what the audience demands, what the book demands, but it was lost on me I’m afraid. I think it’s definitely worth every penny you pay to see it, just know what you’re in for. Once you get over the fact that all the Russians are actually English you should have a pretty good time with this film, you won’t see many others like it, that’s for sure.