Title: Anna Karenina
Release Date: 2012
Rating:
Staring: Keira Knightley, Jude Law, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Kelly MacDonald, Domhall Gleensen, Alicia Vikander, and Matthew Macfadyen
My Rating C.
My Review:
Alright, I knew going in that this was going to be a weird movie. Its Tolstoy. The man doesn’t do simple happy ever afters. I’m not entirely sure he does happily ever afters at all. Plus I had read a few bits of the book before watching the movie. I’m determined to go back and actually read the whole thing. If I can read Game of Thrones, which is 900 pages long, I think I can stretch a little further and read Anna Karenina.
Anyway, why did I give this film a C. Well, the casting was full of people I like (Matthew MacDadyen, Alicia Vikander, and Kiera Knightly especially), so I can’t complain about the acting. The costuming was excellant No, I just thought the staging was weird.
And by staging I mean the whole movie is built like its the mutant child of a stage play and a film. Sometimes you feel like you have the full screen depth of a movie, and sometimes you felt like you were watching a recording of a play. Which I suppose could be seen as an inventive way of making this all out to be some theme about how society is play on image.
It just threw me off really. I think if they had started it that way, and perhaps ended it that way it would have been sufficent, but they kept routing it through the whole movie.
Also I found I cared very little for Anna and Vronksky, Wishing there was more of Stiva and his family, or Levin & Kitty more then there was Anna. I’m not sure how much of that is because of the source material or the script itself.
Sokorra Lewis 