I’m not sure this is a successful adaptation, but I’m also not sure what a successful adaptation of Anna Karenina would even look like. It’s beautiful to look at, certainly, but what does that beauty ultimately signify? Artifice, I suppose - the suffocating artifice of Anna’s life (and of her husband’s), the gilded cage she tries to get out of. What else is there to say about that?
We see the gilded cage, and Anna - beautiful, remote, charming - inside it. We see, finally, the natural world that Levin throws himself into, and we see its difficulty and its simpler beauty redeem him and lead him to real love. It’s easy, isn’t it? Anna’s world, the world of her brother and her husband and Vronsky and Betsy and all the rest of them, is a theater, one that’s decaying around them. Its beauty is real, but cold and stultifying. They are performing all the time for an audience that might not exist. Levin and Kitty, by the end of the story, have something real, and honest, and lasting - they exist in the real world.
I get it. But it’s very obvious, isn’t it, and I don’t know that it works for this kind of story. As a device the theater set that the film mostly exists in is rather Brechtian, I suppose intentionally. It prevents you from complete immersion and forces you to think about ideas. But what are the ideas? The artifice itself is both the device and the idea. The thing is signifying itself.
I’ve read Anna Karenina. I know Anna’s life is suffocating and artificial. I know that Levin and Kitty have the real love story, that they have the happy ending that Anna doesn’t get. It’s ok that the movie emphasizes those things. But Anna’s passion, her intelligence, and her loving nature are all missing. I can’t help but feel, when I watch this adaptation, that Joe Wright has a certain amount of contempt for her. His sympathies are with Kitty, and with Dolly, and with Karenin - with the victims of Anna’s selfishness. Anna does not seem to especially love anyone; it’s hard not to feel that she gets what she deserves at the end.
It’s odd to make a film of Anna Karenina that doesn’t seem to want to be a film about Anna herself.