Anna Karenina

Title: Anna Karenina (2012) [130 min]
Studio: Working Title Films / StudioCanal
Director: Joe Wright
Writers: Tom Stoppard (screenplay), based on the novel by Leo Tolstoy
Cast:

• Keira Knightley (Anna Karenina)
• Jude Law (Alexei Karenin)
• Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Count Vronsky)
• Kelly Macdonald (Dolly)
• Matthew Macfadyen (Oblonsky)
• Domhnall Gleeson (Levin)
• Ruth Wilson (Princess Betsy)
• Alicia Vikander (Kitty)
• Olivia Williams (Countess Vronsky)
• Emily Watson (Countess Lydia Ivanovna)

Log line

A tragic affair upends the marriage and standing of Russian aristocrat Anna Karenina after she falls for the cavalry officer Count Vronsky.

Plot Summary

In imperial Russia, Anna Karenina (Keira Knightley) is married to the senior statesman Alexei Karenin (Jude Law) but falls into a consuming affair with the cavalry officer Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), setting off her social and personal ruin. Running alongside Anna’s story is the courtship of the landowner Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) and Kitty (Alicia Vikander), whose more grounded romance contrasts with Anna’s doomed one. Joe Wright stages much of the film within and around a theater, with sets transforming openly between scenes — ballrooms becoming train platforms, offices dissolving into fields — to underline the performative, watched nature of the aristocratic society Anna is destroyed by defying.

Production Notes

Director Joe Wright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard built the film around a self-conscious theatrical conceit: much of the action unfolds on and around a literal stage, with the artifice of set changes left visible to the audience, a device meant to echo the performative social world the characters inhabit. It was the third collaboration between Wright and Keira Knightley, following Pride & Prejudice (2005) and Atonement (2007). The production design and costumes (by Jacqueline Durran) were widely praised; the film won the Costume Designers Guild Award for Excellence in Period Film and an Academy Award nomination for Best Costume Design.

Notable Reviews

• The New York Times called it “risky and ambitious enough to count as an act of artistic hubris, and confident enough to triumph on its own slightly — wonderfully — crazy terms.”
• The Washington Post wrote that Wright’s “self-conscious theatricality and dollhouse aesthetic” made him “outstrip both… Baz Luhrmann and Wes Anderson in moral seriousness and maturity.”
• Roger Ebert found it “sumptuous” but “extravagantly staged,” cautioning that the production sometimes upstaged the story. Review
• The Los Angeles Times called it “visually stunning, emotionally overwrought, beautifully acted, but not quite right.”
• Boxoffice Magazine called it “a masterpiece of moving pieces, a dizzying and obscenely beautiful film.”
• Metacritic aggregate score: 63 (“Generally Favorable”). Metacritic

Sources

• Wikipedia
• IMDB
• Roger Ebert review
• Metacritic