This semester, my film class assigned several essays by André Bazin, including “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest,” which argues that film versions of novels should aim for what he calls equivalence in meaning of the forms. The very best adaptation manages to “transform the voltage of the novel,” converting its energy into a power that crackles over the lens. Yet even middling vulgarizations of great literary works did not bring some great evil in the world. Lite, abridged movie versions could serve as a gateway to the original novels.

I could apply what I learned to my reaction to Anna Karenina. It would be the virtuous thing to do. But it’s hard, in the days (nay, hours) following finals, to fit his essay over the framework of extra-curricular joys. My more analytical neural clusters have split, maybe for good, from my pleasure receptors. The only thing I brought with me into the theater was the memory of the movies I’d loved more than the  texts from which they sprang, like The Princess Bride and The Lord of the Rings. Films like that make the worlds so much bigger on the inside than they had seemed on the outside.

After what felt a particularly long and sludgy week, a few friends and I (we who live on the wild side) said, “Fuck it, we’re going to see Anna Karenina.” We shoved aside the papers and course packets and ran off to the movies. I enjoy a Joe Wright literary adaptation, but one of my friends declared his movies too “sleepy” for her. They seem so sleek with prestige, so stamped and Oscar-ready. But a sleepy, soaped-up costume drama was all we wanted. We wanted to go to a nice big dark room and settle our eyes on something pretty, something that went down easy.

Seven years ago, Wright made Pride and Prejudice. Running a slim 127 minutes to the 1995 BBC miniseries’ 300 minutes, his adaptation was lighter, crisper, and—some argued—freer. Those older versions were pale, stiff, indoors sort of movies, with low budgets and a set they were chained to. Wright’s Pride and Prejudice opened itself to the outdoors, to vistas from high cliffs, to pigs lumbering through the Bennet household. Lizzie and Darcy were shoved into the rain for their pivotal quarrel, were drawn into a sunlit meadow for their reconciliation; even their final scene of domestic bliss takes place on a porch. Exterior shots brought naturalism, and with naturalism came a renewed sense of romance. There is something about dappled sunshine and Keira Knightley’s dimples which pair together sweetly. It’s a dreaminess, even a fizziness, totally foreign to Austen. It drove some people up a wall. It went straight for my heart.

But the descriptor “atmospheric” would prove to be a double-edged sword with the release of Atonement two years later. Response to the film was tepid, and what drew the most criticism was the very cinematic sensibility which had warmed people to Wright’s previous work. Remember the long shots of Dunkirk at sunrise, the extravagant beauty of the war-torn French countryside? It was a gloss totally at odds with the horror of war. It was nice to look at, but strangely deadening. (The one spark of life was the imagined reunion, when Cecilia—Knightley again, thinner, more severe—whispers to Robbie, “Come back to me.”) Atonement was somehow too beautiful to fully realize the psychological depth of the original novel. Exterior had been substituted for interior, rather than expressing it. The movie just didn’t think hard enough.

With a screenplay by Stoppard, Anna Karenina couldn’t help but be a more cerebral movie. It’s nowhere near as monumental as Tolstoy’s novel, but would we want such a thing to try and drag itself across the screen? Stoppard takes whichever elements please him and use them to assemble a fascinating Fabergé egg of a movie, an object to marvel at. Compressions in time express themselves in impossible spaces. Anna Karenina is as tightly wound as an old-fashioned clock, as carefully constructed as a music box. Its gears are the relentless churn of the train wheels—and I really do mean relentless, the doom starts early and re-surfaces often—its inner compartments continually unfold to reveal themselves: the stairway from the princess’ ballroom leads to Karenin’s study; Levin throws open the doors of the palace and strides out into his beloved estate. Spinning in the center is Knightley, reincarnated as a Russian, looking positively skeletal and bizarrely young. When she hugs her son to her, she seems like a favorite older sister, not like a mother. Her caprices are baffling and illegible. (Sidelined, wasted, stands Michelle Dockerey: she is a thinking sort of woman, someone to whom love could only come unexpectedly. The Anna of my heart.)

This film version of Anna Karenina, written by a playwright, is fascinated by the theatricality of Russian society, of nobles who hold out their arms as servants whisk around, dressing them. It plays with the idea of performance and audience, public and private. The film opens with a red curtain rising onto the scene. Needless to say, it does not have a straight-shooting kind of script, and plays a few more tricks than Pride and Prejudice or Atonement ever dared to attempt. Yet this film, like Wright’s others, continues to grapple with the old problems of exteriors and interiors: the sumptuous and clever private rooms are not balanced with the pastoral estates. Not enough attention is paid to Levin and his forays into the fields to make them feel substantive, and Joe Wright is not exactly a purveyor of grit. After a long and exhausting day, Levin falls, perfectly arranged, onto a bale of hay to sleep.

The closing image of the film is a strange one, and seems perfectly emblematic of Wright’s problem of outside and inside: the Karenin children play in a field, as their father looks on. The grass is Technicolor lush, spreading across the floor of the theater we began the film in. None of us knew what to do with this moment, this image of domesticity which seemed so antithetical to the bureaucratic Alexei, the sunshine streaming through the wood, the over-bright artifice. It was a strange cross between the cerebral and the pleasurable, an overgrowth that still felt too neat and too contained.

 


 
 
Become a Patron!

This post may contain affiliate links.