Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina

It is not the story that distinguishes Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” as a great novel rather than a soap opera, but the style and ideas expressed within it. There are numerous tales about wealthy women who abandon their old husbands to run off with playboys. This particular adaptation clarifies that by focusing on its plot which is without any of Tolstoy’s insight an unbearably gloomy melodrama. She is a woman of intoxicating loveliness and fervor whose deepening gloominess becomes so oppressive by the end we would just as soon see her throw herself under a train and are not much cheered when she does.

The film was made on location in Russia; we see St. Petersburg exteriors, country estates, opulent Czarist palaces with corridors receding to infinity. It all looks wonderful, but the characters except for one are clunks who seem to be in awe of being in a screen adaptation of a Russian classic. The exception is Alexei Karenin, Anna’s husband, played by James Fox with such weary bitterness I found myself feeling sorry for him even when he was being cruel to poor Anna.

The story: Anna (Sophie Marceau) lives on her husband’s country estate, where their marriage has gone dry. She goes to the city to advise her rakish brother Stiva (Danny Huston), who is mistreating his wife. She meets a slickster named Count Vronsky (Sean Bean), who has a mistress named Kitty (Mia Kirshner), but drops her in mid-waltz when he sees Anna. They dance together; she is thrilled by his boldness; she departs by train; he stops the train in the middle of nowhere at 3:00 a.m., etc., etc.; it is not reassuring that while he makes love declarations we are more concerned with how his horses could have outrun the train.

Back at her country estate, Vronsky continues his pursuit and Anna eventually succumbs, after a brief struggle. Karenin sees what is going on, especially during a steeplechase when Vronsky’s horse falls and Anna screams with concern unseemly in another man’s wife. Soon she is pregnant by him. Karenin tries to rape her, then cuts a deal: If she will stay with him and behave herself, she can keep the child. Otherwise, she gets Vronsky but not the child.

In any late 19th century novel worth its salt we expect these developments to lead to a sickbed scene of reconciliation and forgiveness etc., meanwhile the city provides a parallel romance between Kitty and Levin (Alfred Molina), who is kind but lacks charisma. In the novel Levin stands for Tolstoy, and also for decency that other characters lack.

The challenge of any adapter of “Anna Karenina” is to make Anna sympathetic despite her bad behavior. Sometimes this is done by casting (who would deny Garbo anything?), sometimes by writing. Here it is not done. I never felt sympathy for her; perhaps because Sophie Marceau (from “Braveheart”) makes her such a narcissistic sponge, while Fox makes her husband tortured but understandable. Toward the end, as society shuns them and they live in near isolation from all but each other’s company, she even gets on his nerves after becoming an addict to laudanum.

In this adaptation, however, there is so much more to Tolstoy’s novel than meets the eye. Bernard Rose is a director with an exceptional eye for talent (remember his visionary film “Paperhouse” or his passionate biopic on Beethoven, “Immortal Beloved?”). Here, though, it feels as if he’s lost track of what makes these people tick: Shooting on fabulous locations; the movie comes off as a storyboard for “Anna Karenina” all life and subtlety still to be added.

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