Review of Anna Karenina (2012) by Anthony_Brahim — 24 Nov 2012

A Beautiful Beast.

I'm referring to the film, not to its Anna. Knightly's portrayal isn't worthy of such strong descriptive words. Admittedly, she wan't bad...until she opened her mouth. In truth, the film would've been much richer had it been a silent one. Wright never fails visually. There is no doubting that this adaptation is ambitious and imaginative, but, in the physical world, one's ambitions are nearly always unmet. I found myself cringing during dialogue. Tom Stoppard is an extraordinary writer, but neither him nor Wright were good conductors of Tolstoy's ideas. The script seemed unaware of the vision, and the vision of the words. I felt as if I was listening to a high school literature teacher, finger on the fast-forward button, struggle to hit all the major plot points of a book-on-tape. The dialogue only served to make the story feel rushed and the viewer spoon-fed. Setting it in a theatre was brilliant, but the too-literalness of this literary classic was not.