Review: _Anna Karenina:_ Yet more self-indulgent crap

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When I was a young teen, I was considered to be a precocious reader. I was by then reading adult books, and by that, I mean that I was beyond the simple, rather rainbow-hued books designed for children and young adults. The most vivid of the early novels that I read was Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. The first film adaptation that I watched of Anna Karenina was the version broadcast in the late seventies, and it was magnificent. They had the entire book there, in ten episodes, and for me it became the gold standard by which all other versions would be measured. When yet another version of Anna Karenina appeared in 2012, I perked my ears up. After all, this had an incredible cast, full of high end actors, the production values looked good, and it was generating a lot of talk. When it finally rolled onto Netflix -- streaming is pretty much the way I watch movies now -- I settled in to watch it. The film starts with the chaos of the Oblonsky home in Moscow in the mid-1870's. The father, Stepan (Matthew Macfadyen) has been caught cheating with the governess by his wife, Dolly (Kelly Macdonald). In despair, Stepan begs for his sister, Anna (Kiera Knightley) to come rescue the situation and reconcile him with his wife. When she arrives in Moscow, she casually meets the handsome Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) in passing, unaware of the fateful events to come. Anna, utterly charming, sophisticated, and faithful to her husband, Karenin (Jude Law), meets Dolly's younger sister Kitty (Alicia Vikander), who is very young and naive. Kitty is expected to marry Vronsky, who has been courting her in an off-hand way, and invites Anna to her coming-out ball, where she'll be launched into aristocratic society. To complicate matters, Stepan runs into his old friend, Levin (Domhnall Gleeson), who's a bit of a bumpkin, and prefers staying on his country estate above all else. Levin is desperately in love with Kitty, but she scorns him due to his lack of social skills, and he beats a retreat to his estate to soothe his broken heart. And so our players in our drama are gathered together at the ball. Dressed in vivid red, Anna meets Vronsky again in all of his uniformed splendour and the pair of them dance together for the first time. They only have eyes for each other, and Kitty's heart is shattered when she sees them together. When the pair return to St. Petersburg, their tragic romance begins, and Anna's life starts to go to pieces... Director Joe Wright takes Tom Stoppard's script, and once again we're brutalized by a truncation of Tolstoy's masterpiece. You simply cannot take a nine-hundred page book and then slice the heart of it out, and cram it into two hours or so. Tolstoy was making a statement with his novel, contrasting the aristocratic life of St. Petersburg and Moscow with the simpler life in the countryside, and using the two romantic tales of Anna and Vronsky and Kitty and Levin to bring it to life. Unfortunately, Wright tries to tell both stories, and it fails. Spectacularly. Let's start with the actors. Jude Law is the best of the lot, playing the cold, knuckle-cracking Karenin to perfection. This one they get right, and for once, I actually felt pity for the character, seeing a man who is helpless to stop what is happening to his marriage. But the casting of Keira Knightley as Anna is a mistake -- she certainly looks the part, what with the big doe-eyes, but her style of acting tends to render her cow-like with her trademark open mouth style. It's a demanding role, but here, she's a one-note. Too, our Vronsky is a witless twit, not at all the polished courtier that the book portrays him as. As to the rest of the characters, they are forgettable despite being rather good at their jobs. Next is the art direction, or rather the staging. Here, Wright has turned the story into a vast stage, with artificial scenes being pulled or lowered into place, cheesy effects and stilted action. Too, while the costumes were in keeping with the period, it's jarring to see Anna as a vivid red-blond, and in a red dress rather than a black one at the ball -- Tolstoy was very specific as to how his characters looked and wore at times. But what really sent me over the edge and wanting to fling a heavy object at the screen was how Anna and Vronsky danced. It's this bizarre mixture of modern ballet and the waltz, and it stinks. Their hands are waving about -- which you don't do in ballroom dance -- there's lifts, there's whirling by one or the other, and it is just a mess. From there the film just gets painful to see, and by the end of this cheap effort, I was glad to see it end. Film fans should watch for such actors as Michelle Dockery (who would make a terrific Anna in the right film or better yet, mini-series) and Ruth Wilson in several cameos. Surprisingly, this won one Oscar (for Best Costume Design), and was nominated for several others, and won a few more, mostly for costume and production design. This is rated R for some nudity and sex, along with a bit of violence, and it grinds along for just over two hours. Most older teens would be bored silly by this one, so leave it to those who are big fans of the leads, or like costume dramas. I give this lumbering bore just one star out of five and don't recommend it. It's a terrible film, and despite the inventiveness of the director and the beautiful design, it is simply not worth the effort. I'll be writing more about the versions of this classic novel soon.