After he'd finished reading Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, did director Joe Wright scribble on the last page, "Needs more pep?"
Wright is, after all, the man who put the cute little ampersand in Pride & Prejudice and gave us a giggly Lizzie Bennet rendered by Keira Knightley. Knightley is back again in the title role as the Russian chick who loves and loses and throws herself under a train.
Casting the British actress, whose last memorable performance was in Bend It Like Beckham and who appears topless on the cover of the current Allure magazine, may have brought roses to the cheeks of the folks in marketing. But it creates a crippling problem with regard to gravitas, of which more anon.
Meantime, welcome to Joe Wright's Anna Karenina: The Musical. No one actually sings, but from the proscenium-arch opening on the adulterer Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen) scurrying down a well-upholstered hallway in search of fun, to its final shots of noble peasants rhythmically scything, the movie sets out to deliver Broadway dazzle.
There are dances, there are races, there are freeze-frame tableaux vivants in the manner of My Fair Lady. There is heaving between the sheets, followed by wringing of hands and rueing of the day.
And for a while at least, why not have a ball? Tolstoy gave good ballroom, too, and for all his reputation as the ultimate realist writer, he deployed an array of literary strategies in Anna Karenina — including a section written from the point of view of a dog. But his prose wasn't forever blaring, "Look, Ma, no hands!"
And given that Anna's adventures in extramarital romance famously end in tears, there are (or should be) limits to how long you can sustain the jaunty tone; Wright keeps at it, alas, until it's too late for tragedy, even considering the endlessly foreshadowing grind of giant train wheels presumably meant to remind us that this is not a caper.
The best that can be said of Knightley is that she's puppy-eyed eye candy, in vibrant reds and blacks with fur trims to die for. But that's window dressing, and under her glossy surface, Anna Karenina is a woman of many passionately conflicting parts — reluctant temptress, ardent lover, loving mother, an urban sophisticate who's also deeply insecure and hungry for approval. She's a modern woman way before her time.
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Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a cavalry officer who ignores 19th century Russian social norms to pursue a married woman.