Joe Wright staged Tolstoy's Anna Karenina almost entirely inside a theatre
Instead of sweeping across Russian landscapes, Joe Wright's 2012 Anna Karenina plays most of its action on and around a theatre stage, as if high society were a performance watched by everyone. Critics split over the conceit, but the costumes won both an Oscar and a BAFTA.
Tom Stoppard adapted Leo Tolstoy's 1878 novel, and Keira Knightley took the title role in her third film with Wright, after Pride and Prejudice and Atonement. Jude Law plays her husband, the senior statesman Alexei Karenin, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson the wealthy cavalry officer Count Vronsky. Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly Macdonald, Domhnall Gleeson and Alicia Vikander fill out the supporting cast. Working Title Films produced it with StudioCanal.
The story opens in 1874, with Anna travelling from Saint Petersburg to Moscow to patch up her brother Stiva's marriage after his infidelity. On the train she meets Vronsky's mother and then Vronsky himself, and the attraction is immediate. At a ball he ignores young Princess Kitty, who had hoped to marry him, and devotes the evening to Anna. Back in the capital their affair sets tongues wagging; he turns down a posting to Tashkent to stay near her.
Tolstoy's counterweight runs alongside. Levin, a landowner scorned in Moscow for preferring the country, is first refused by Kitty, later reunited with her, and finds a steadier love as Kitty defies convention to help nurse his dying brother. Anna's path runs the other way: she confesses to Karenin, nearly dies in childbirth and is briefly forgiven, then leaves for Italy with Vronsky and their daughter. Returning to Saint Petersburg, she is barred from her son and publicly shunned at the opera, and she grows suspicious and dependent on morphine.
The film premiered at the Toronto festival in 2012 and opened in Britain on 7 September and in the United States on 16 November. It took about $69 million worldwide, mostly outside America. Reviewers admired the cast but many felt Wright favoured style over substance. It gathered four Academy Award and six BAFTA nominations, with Jacqueline Durran winning both for costume design.
Source: Anna Karenina (2012 film)
