"Anna Karenina' on film, again

Feodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov probably agree about only one thing: the greatness of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Faulkner called it the greatest novel ever written.

Of course, it's a thousand pages long, like one of those endless Russian sleigh rides. You need a deep armchair and many, many evenings. That's not the way most of us spend our time these days.

Fortunately (or not), we have movies. Thirteen film adaptations of Anna Karenina have been made, beginning with a Russian version in 1914. Two of them starred Greta Garbo. You can forget about all the rest, including Garbo's own first effort, which carried an alternative happy ending for American audiences. The 1935 Garbo, with Frederic March, is the gold standard, although the Vivien Leigh version rates honorable mention.

Of course, you could read the book, but... who's got a deep armchair in this Age of Kindle?

The modern style of rendering the classics is a plush and upholstered "Masterpiece Theatre" version. Period authenticity is stressed, but the characters themselves tend to come straight out of "Dallas." They're rich people, antsy for pleasure under their starched collars and tight corsets, full of intrigue and riding for a fall. This is what a vulgar age makes of an aristocratic one.

Carried away

Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is a complex and intelligent woman who doesn't know she's unhappy. As the wife of a senior minister, she occupies a high social position, and with it comes great responsibility. The first responsibility is virtue; but failing that, discretion.

When Anna finds herself falling in love with Vronsky, a young cavalry officer considerably her junior, she realizes her peril and tries to avoid it. That her feelings carry her away is, she knows, no justification for yielding to them. Confusion results when she does— a confusion that clouds her judgment and exposes her to mortal danger.

Tolstoy is at his best in describing Anna's inner life and the turmoil she experiences. It takes a great actress to express even a fraction of this; it takes… Garbo.

Flattered ego

Vronsky is in well over his head with Anna. He's not a bad man, simply a mediocre one— that is, unproblematically representative of his culture and class. Anna flatters his ego, as conquests above one's rank tend to. But it's inevitable that Vronsky will betray her at every level. He lacks the resources not to.

Alexei Karenin is the third person of the triangle. He's 20 years Anna's senior and has stopped caring for her but not, as he will discover, loving her.

Karenin's feelings, too, are complex and entangled. He's deeply humiliated by Anna; he's also deeply angered by her disrespect for her social role. Since he's unable to separate his personal response from, as it were, his ministerial one, he retreats into rigidity— the safest posture for him but also the most helpless one.

Film's limitations

Karenin is in no position to fight a duel with a junior officer, nor will he stoop to compete for Anna's affections. Of course, he could post his rival to a safe distance and obstruct his career. But that would simply leave him alone with Anna, and this is the last thing he can face. So it is she, rather than Vronsky, who must be banished.

Tolstoy can turn all these issues around like the facets of a diamond exposed by cutting, and the perfected gem is the tragedy. But film enjoys no such leisure. Each scene must fulfill a limited but definite task.

Tolstoy has room for subsidiary characters and subplots, notably the romance between the idealistic nobleman Levin and the immature debutante Kitty. In Levin's character the novelist partly satirizes himself— a capacity he would lose later in life. Much of this diversion, too, must necessarily be lost in the compression of a two-hour film.

Tacky backdrops

Joe Wright has made the decision to stylize much of novel in rendering it for the screen. Most of the film was shot on an old sound stage at Shepperton, outside London, and the action is continually framed in theatrical terms. Wright's choice of a playwright, Tom Stoppard, as his scenarist, is of a piece with this approach.

Much has been made of the sumptuous the costumes and sets, but their realism is vitiated by the film's underlying theatricality. This is a possible strategy for focusing on the central triangle, but Wright's handling of his main characters lacks coherence.

The result is jumpy and fussy while at the same time melodramatic. Doors are continually being flung open, as if there were no other way to enter a room. For all the art and expense, there's a certain tackiness; we see characters at a ball against a backdrop that's clearly a piece of propped-up scenery, and a train on its winter journey that's obviously a model going around a toy track.

Everybody, too, is whistling a tune from Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony in this St. Petersburg of 1874— a remarkable feat, since the score wasn't composed until 1878.

Sexual attraction, then and now

In the end, of course, it's all about the acting. Unfortunately, no one comes off well.

As Anna, Keira Knightley projects a brittle sense of sexual entitlement quite at odds with Tolstoy's character, whose deep sensuality, once stirred, proves her undoing. The film Anna is counseled on how discreet affairs are conducted in her circle, but Tolstoy's whole point is that she's incapable of tempering her responses and thus playing the game. In our modern parlance, sexual attraction consists of being "turned on"; there is no slow maturing of awareness, and when Knightley acknowledges Vronsky her expression has all the subtlety of a light switch being thrown.

This overreaction might not seem so disastrous if she were able to convince us of her grand passion, but there's a complete of absence of chemistry between Knightley and her co-star, Andrew Taylor-Johnson.

Older man, or oldish boy?

Jude Law is Karenin, although he's a good decade too young for the part and wholly lacks the gravitas of high office: He seems merely an oldish boy who never had much pencil in him. Again, Karenin is a much more nuanced character potentially trying to escape Stoppard's script but never making it out.

Similarly, Domnhnall Gleason's Levin is one of Tolstoy's tormented idealists; but satisfied puppy love, chastened by the realities of fatherhood, seems to solve all his problems.

Indeed, the film's transitions are uniformly wrenched and abrupt; there's no sense of narrative command or development; and when Anna finally throws herself under the train, it seems as though it could as easily be a fit of pique as an act of despair.

Great novels usually make disappointing films, and first-rate minds in second-class hands invariably produce disastrous results. If this Anna Karenina were a costume drama dreamed up by some hacks, well… but it's a snarky takedown of a classic of world literature. Viewer, read the book.