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Anna Karenina: Joe Wright’s high-concept retelling of Tolstoy’s famous morality tale about love, seduction and duty (aided with a pared-down script by Oscar-winner Tom Stoppard that doesn’t completely clear up the confusing multiple names in Russian novels) won’t be everybody’s cup of borscht. But it is so gorgeous and stylistically wrought it’s hard to take your eyes off the elaborate spectacle. Wright’s version takes place in a lavish 19th-century theatre, much of it onstage. The carefully choreographed set pieces and stunning costumes highlight Keira Knightley’s skilful portrayal of the alternating flighty and tragic heroine, with Jude Law as her reserved, cuckolded husband Alexei, and Aaron Johnson as the dashing Count Vronsky who steals her heart and destroys her soul. Linda Barnard

In an all-British cast, Matthew MacFadyen stands out as Anna’s randy, insouciant brother Oblonsky, while Jude Law pleasingly reins himself in as her husband Karenin – a dull, virtuous public man.

Called to Moscow by her errant brother Oblonsky (a terrific performance by Matthew Macfadyen, offering genial comedy to the role), whose philandering ways have final caused havoc to his marriage to Dolly (Kelly Macdonald), and he hopes Anna can try and ease the problems between them.

The main love-triangle plot is plaited with an account of gentleman farmer and Tolstoy-avatar Levin (Domhnall Gleeson), a strand given short shrift in most other film versions. A friend of Anna's brother Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen, offering amusing comic relief), Levin wishes to marry pretty Princess Kitty (Alicia Vikander, luminous), who refuses Levin at first, thinking herself in love with Vronsky. But Vronsky abandons Kitty as soon as he meets Anna, a transference neatly symbolized by the partner-swapping in the key ballroom scene, intricately choreographed by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui to make the dancers look like graceful automatons. Further down the line, Kitty and Levin discover a love that's built of stronger, more hard-wearing stuff.

Wright’s conceit is to dramatise the lion’s share of Tolstoy’s 864 pages inside a dilapidated 19th century theatre to suggest the falsity of Russian society, only roaming into “real” world to follow young romantic Levin (a terrific Domhnall Gleeson) in his search for a “real” life...
Around the central couples, a clutch of familiar faces help navigate the dense dramatis personae — stand-outs include Law as Anna’s staid spouse (you’ll shudder at his little box) and a boisterous Macfadyen as Anna’s brother — but this is really its director’s movie. Bold, imaginative, thought-provoking and passionate, Anna Karenina puts Wright at the forefront of filmmaking in Britain. Or anywhere.

Verdict
If it doesn’t ultimately engage your heart as it might, Anna Karenina is period drama at its most exciting, intoxicating and modern. Spellbinding.

Matthew Macfadyen did a fantastically exuberant performance !...Yes, he is particularly enjoyable ...It's such an exuberant creation !

The reminder of the cast is filled with recognisable faces (many of whom fill me with a smile whenever I see them), those we have become accustomed to the period drama including Ruth Wilson, Michelle Dockery, Olivia Williams and Matthew Macfadyen (who plays Oblonsky, Anna’s brother with such comic conviction, it’s a welcome return to the big screen).

Director Joe Wright's bold reimagining of the period drama made its debut at the Venice Film Festival on Monday.

Successes are a bombastic Matthew Macfadyen as Anna's roguish brother Oblonsky (Wright ensures P&P fans come away happy, with a number of affectionate scenes between Knightley and Macfadyen) and Kelly Macdonald as his long-suffering wife Dolly.

Anna Karenina is a big, expensive bauble: pristine, polished and admirable, but structurally brittle and completely hollow.

Bold adaptation of Tolstoy ultimately feels too artificial and deterministic...Knightley gives Anna a decent shot but she lacks the mature beauty and inner radiance described in the novel; of all contemporary actresses, Marion Cotillard would come closest to an ideal Anna.

Spoiler:

Deglamorized, with glasses and a receding hairline, Law makes for a composed and accessible Karenin who's not too priggish and boring. Vikander, the star of the upcoming Danish costumer A Royal Affair, is a fine Kitty, red-headed and bearded Gleeson grows nicely into a sympathetic Levin (the sort-of Tolstoy figure) and Macfadyen excels as a vigorous, non-fuddy-duddyish Oblonsky.

Directorial masturbation is the only way to describe this attempt at 'art'

it's a film I will gladly never see again.

Spoiler:

In tone less Russian, or British, than Italian, Wright’s Anna Karenina has crucial links to Luchino Visconti’s 1954 Senso, in which a woman of title (the great Alida Valli) risks her marriage, her standing and her pride on an affair with a selfish young officer (Farley Granger).

By setting much of Tolstoy's masterpiece inside a theatre, Joe Wright both dazzles and distances the viewer.

Another gem is Knightley’s Pride & Prejudice co-star Matthew Macfadyen, camping it up and having a ball as Anna’s philandering brother, Oblonsky, and bringing a lively spirit to the behind-the-scenes setting.

Matthew Macfadyen steals the show as the rampaging id, Oblonsky. He gets many of the best lines, and Macfadyen really adores the opportunity to ham it up. I’m genuinely surprised the actor hasn’t achieved a higher profile in the years since he first started appearing on the big screen.

With bold experimentation one can take a classic text and deliver something audience’s haven’t quite experienced before. Wright shoots his leading lady with the same fetishistic attention that Von Sternberg shot Marlene Dietrich. Indeed, this version of Anna Karenina exists in a fine lineage that links to Von Sternberg, Powell and Pressburger, and more modern masters such as Lars Von Trier and Peter Greenaway. All film-makers that have revelled in the artificiality of the medium and pulled back the curtain to reveal the mechanics of cinema, yet equally, delivered something quintessentially cinematic. Wright, however, needs to be careful his skills do not turn into gluttony, mania or self-parody.

...he's made a film that's almost inevitably an acquired taste - a curate's Faberge egg.

The major flaw is that the ending doesn’t quite have the emotional heft for which one would hope. This is perhaps an inevitable function of the very deliberate artifice employed throughout; the point is that we're watching a construct, which makes it easy to admire but hard to get weepy over.

Verdict
Tolstoy's novel rendered in exquisite Faberge egg form, Joe Wright's vision of aristocratic passions and hypocrisies is closer to a ballet or opera than a boring old period adaptation and is all the better for it.