'Anna Karenina’ Directed by Joe Wright, Screenplay by Tom Stoppard from the novel by Leo Tolstoy. 12A. 130 mins.
President Obama is asking his voters a profound question. Do they want a society where the winner takes, and keeps, all? Or do they want a society that recognizes and respects the needs and dignity of all it's members? This is an ethical question because it is about the ultimate value of our fellow human beings. Some believe that any society that gets its ultimate values wrong contains the seeds of its own destruction. Its values are not ‘real’, but artificial. Tolstoy lived in a society that depended on serf labour. He saw the ethical falsity of that. Maybe that is why he condemned the theatre as vanity. His society was the real charade, a farce masking a tragedy, elegant but ugly, where highly defined hierarchies and etiquettes decorously dressed moral sewers.
It is ironic that Anna Karenina has been filmed for theatrical screening at least four times. I suggest that Joe Wright’s film is the best by far. After Atonement and Jane Eyre we may take it for granted that his films will be carefully cast, beautifully photographed and scored and skillfully directed. We know that Tom Stoppard’s uses the theatre to pursue truth in philosophy, science, politics, and personal relationships.
So when they film most of the action in this adaptation within a theatre they are making a point. Some have found this metaphor alienating. That may be part of the intent. This is an artificial false society, portrayed as such. Even choreography is used subversively. Servants dance in circles to meet their master's every whim. At the Society Balls the aristocratic dancers employ elaborate gestures, intertwining their hands and arms gracefully, but with no true contact, no genuine intimacy.
It is on this stage that Anna (Kiera Knightley) meets and falls passionately in love with Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). I think Knightley outdoes Greta Garbo and Vivien Leigh in her portrayal of a woman driven mad by passion. Jude Law plays her upright husband in a way that invites our sympathy. Matthew Macfadyen, as her brother, Oblonsky, accepts his own promiscuity with a resigned but cheerful bonhomie. Domhnall Gleeson plays Levin, an earnest young landowner seeking, like Tolstoy, a just way to order his life and estates.
At the end of the film his new wife, Kitty (Alicia Vikander), washes a dying man’s body. In this action she gives those earlier ball-room movements true grace, a compassionate intimacy that strikes her husband dumb with wonder. He has just learnt, from one of his workers, that it is not reason that teaches us how to live, but love. He rushes home to share this revelation with his wife, but Kitty's actions are enacting what Levin has been seeking. What she is doing is socially unacceptable and absolutely right.
At one level Karenina is about the marriage contract, love and adultery, but it is also about the social contract imposed by the rich and powerful on the poor and powerless. As much as any cuckolded spouse or betrayed wife they too are being shafted. Those in power are faithful to nothing except their own desires and interests.
Is anybody watching? asks Count Vronsky nervously, as Anne initiates adulterous lovemaking in the woods. And she looks upwards. She knows God is watching. But the church offered no critique to these hedonistic Tzarist aristos. Today the Russian Orthodox Church offers no protest as the Riot Pussies’ criticism of Putin is condemned as blasphemy. In our own Western ethical and economic crisis our churches too seem muted or compromised. What does it say now, in a world were wealth is ever flowing upwards, with conspicuous consumption mocking those compelled to live on an unliveable 'living' wage, and in a Britain where a government run by old Etonians is making the poorest pay for the folly of the richest, the 1% who run or ruin our world. Our so called 'celebrity' culture offers the proletariat junk food, junk television and Mac-jobs, and offers the individuals, but never the bottom 40% as a whole, the false promise of escape through the lottery, the X factor, or Big Brother. When oh when did that last term lose it's literary and political meaning? Spin, Orwell, spin, alongside Tolstoy and Kafka.
Anna Karenina is surely a tract for our own times.
