Keira Knightley is the most beautiful actress that just can’t act but god can she light up a screen! The film opens in Imperial Russia 1874 in Moscow Society (who knew?) in what feels like some forced ditzy ensemble reminiscent of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge. Turns out its Joe Wright directing. Albeit Wright has directed Knightley before in the fabulous Pride & Prejudice.
Anna is married to Alexi (Jude Law) and they have a son, but like all her girlfriends, these “Reality Housewives of Moscow” are dreadfully bored. They want romance for love, but love is “The last delusion of the old world order.” Then Karenina meets Count
Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and her inner cougar emerges. The life-changing affair will shatter all the lives around her including that of her brother Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen) who keeps flitting in and out of scenes as we await his purpose and eventually come to realize he hasn’t quite got one. But worse than his purposeless storyline – and aside from an affair with his nanny – we only hear about is that of Count Vronsky who starts out as a fascinating and mischievous character before dissolving into somebody we barely understand. This part of the script is lost in the shuffle of hoop skirts, when we wonder where he and Anna go wrong. Could be worse…could be cast in the the boring husband role of Alexi/Jude Law…his contained performance defined by his horrible receding hairline.
The film eventually eases into itself but by then, you’re tired of the story, and suddenly seeing the Tolstoy book better left as “read”
at 900 plus pages then two hours on a screen. Oscar winner Tom Stoppard does a spectacular job with a screenplay that is unfortunately lost in the muffle of counterfeit set design, suggesting something grander than what all these
characters really mean to convey. The upside is that the movie (like the book in its search for life’s true meaning)
follows love from the beginnings of discovery and spark, through marriage and children, through boredom and temptation to eventual choices. Apparently something that reflects every century. Two tiaras