Anna Karenina (2012)

I have to start off by saying that I am not of the opinion that the story that Tolstoy wrote is a love story.  It is a story of a woman who sought drama, who fell superficially in love with a beautiful man, and who completely overestimated the impact of her looks and her charm when it came to breaking the rules and keeping all the privileges.  She was no more capable of loving her lover longitudinally than she was of loving her husband, or even her son, for that matter.  She was willing to leave him behind for her new adventure without much of a look back.  Her ability to love deeply and over time is very much in question in my mind.  To my reading of the book, it was not so much a tragedy as a tale of inevitable outcomes.  A woman hoisted by her own petard.  The juxtaposition of Levin and Kitty’s love, which is more of my idea of love, is in the novel to contrast with what Anna and Vronsky have, which is lust and infatuation.

So no, I do not see Anna as one of the great love stories of modern times, or even as a love story at all.  This film version did not alter the story to make her more loveable—it adheres to the original novel (except we really do not get to see enough of Levin and Kitty), with a funny twist.  There is something very dramatic about Russian literature, and slightly odd (my husband recently said he thinks that he has gone to his last Chekov play—now there is a guy who loves drama.  Chekov, that is, not my husband).  The movie chooses to use the place that Anna meets Vronsky, the opera house, as a recurring theme in the movie—we are constantly returning to the stage—either in the audience, on the stage, or backstage—I am not sure why that is, but it adds to the histrionics of the story.

The part of the movie that is not well fleshed out is the relationship between Stiva (Anna’s brother) and his wife Dolly—Stiva is Levin’s childhood friend, and Kitty is Dolly’s sister, so the two are in the movie, but the fact that Stiva and Dolly are dealing with Stiva’s infidelity is not really addressed.

The character who is best portrayed is Karenin (played quite deftly by Jude Law).  He is brilliant as the Russian mid-level politician and cuckolded husband who loves his straying wife despite all and adores his child.  We sense his difficulty expressing emotions and the role that plays in the demise of his marriage, and we are sympathetic, which is exactly how the book makes you feel.  In the end it is a movie well worth watching, no matter how you feel about Ann--it is lushly filmed and beautifully costumed, a joy of period cinema to watch.