Joe Wright has been a young and exciting auteur, rising through the ranks and leaving his stamp on modern film. With the success of his breakthrough adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, he extended his success through his bold and beautiful adaptation of Atonement garnering him garnering him a Golden Globe nomination for best director. Straying from novel adaptations, Wright showed his range with his 2011 Hanna, a live-wire and electronic reinvention of a fairy tale.
Wright draws on extremely poetic aesthetics in his films; with vibrant mise-en-scene married with emotionally symphonic scores. Wright returns to his novel adaptations with his take on Anna Karenina. Tolstoy’s masterwork weaves the tale of love, adultery, and classism in imperial Russia, focusing in on the titular Anna (Keira Knightley, Pride and Prejudice, Never Let Me Go) and her struggles with her sanity and social scrutiny in the wake of her affair with Count Alexi Vronsky (Aaron Taylor Johnson, Nowhere Boy, Kick-Ass).
Immediately, you’ll notice that the film is shot on a theatrical stage, setting an operatic canvas for the film. The kinetic movement of the shifting set is perfectly coupled with the dazzling costumes, making for a stunning collage of visual figurines and bright set pieces.
The visual aspects of the film are only matched by Dario Marianelli’s enchanting score. Already capturing an Oscar for his work in Atonement, Marianelli’s soundtrack is able to captures both seductive allure and insufferable shame involved in forbidden love.
Wright’s production is a modern ballet, brimming immersive dance sequences and tragically beautiful set pieces. However, beautifully flawed is the best we can afford to Anna Karenina.
While we see strong performances from the entire cast, the film is unable to find a proper tempo to keep up with such long and heavy source material. The first half of Anna Karenina depicts Count Vronsky courting Lady Karenina, and adheres to the theatrical vision, giving the film a rolling cadence. However, the second half of the movie starts to abandon this style, making for a more disjointed narrative.
As Wright begins to examine Anna’s psychosis and paranoia, the film’s tempo comes to a halt. The narrative becomes slightly aimless and repetitive, reducing the potency Anna and Alexei’s increasingly strained relationship. The film becomes too messy to be unable to sustain the substance of the great Russian novel.
Joe Wright has never shied away from the bold and the beautiful, taking classic works and sculpting them into works worthy of the modern canon. However with Karenina, he may have finally bit off more than he could chew. How tragic.