Anna Karenina

The same number of viewers are

watching this in actual movie theaters

Grade: B -
Director: Joe Wright
Starring: Keira Knightley, Jude Law, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Matthew MacFayden, Domhnall Gleeson and Alicia Vikander
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 2 hr. 10 min.

If they handed out awards for pouty lips and come hither stares, Keira Knightley would be the Katherine Hepburn of our generation. As it stands, she’s a talented and, yes, alluring actress who always seems to be in the mix come movie awards season but, to date, only has one Oscar nomination to her credit, for 2005’s Pride & Prejudice. [She is a two-time winner of the Teen Choice Award for “Movie Liplock,” so there’s that.]

It’s little wonder, then, that Knightley has re-teamed with her P&P director Joe Wright twice since, first in the bloated Atonement and now the umpteenth adaptation of Anna Karenina. Their rendering of Leo Tolstoy’s classic novel is opulent and earnest, an eager production that’s more busy than bold. And while there’s much to admire about Wright’s aesthetic, you probably won’t remember what they were a half-hour later.

In adapting Tolstoy’s tale of romance, (in)fidelity and society set in swinging 1870s St. Petersburg, Wright situates the action within the tableau of a stage production, albeit one with a broad conception of space. Scene transitions pass between pulleys curtains and lighting rigs; actors are situated in front of flood lights; some outdoor scenes are conceived with painterly landscapes. It’s a conceit that’s initially off-putting, but gradually the staging devices become an object for artistic admiration, such as a horse race that appears to run from stage right to left and an exquisite ballroom dance scene as Anna (Knightley) and her illicit lover Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) twirl amongst a crowd of onlookers literally frozen in time.

However, Anna Karenina is a story built on passion, which is something that frequently gets lost amongst the cinematic atmospherics. The literary Anna is a victim of cultural mores and desire so unbridled she allows it to compromise her marriage and social standing. While Wright and Knightley effectively convey that reckless abandon, what’s missing is any apprehension for its provenance. Anna simply swoons breathlessly for Vronsky, whom Taylor-Johnson misplays as a preening scalawag who is not dashing nor all that desirable. Moreover, we simply asked to assume the reasons Anna has no love left for her older husband Karenin, well-played with slow-burn restraint by Jude Law. Part of the disconnect is a matter of age: Karenin is 20 years Anna’s senior in Tolstoy’s story while Law is only 12 years older than Knightley. Most of it, however, is a matter of perception. Vronsky does little beyond garble a few sweet nothings to make Anna so blindingly betray her marital and maternal vows.

Thus, so much of the 130-minute running time plays out like overcooked melodrama: think Douglas Sirk meets Max Ophüls meets Baz Luhrmann. That makes for good spectacle, but not necessarily compelling cinema.

Hanna

Cate, have you seen the script?

Grade: B –

Director: Joe Wright

Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana, Cate Blanchett, and Jessica Barden

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 51 min.

Hanna isn’t merely a departure from director Joe Wright’s mannered filmography. It feels more like his antidote for it.

A stylized fable whose substance does not fully measure up to its resounding razzmatazz. Hanna blends a breathless chase thriller with a fairy tale conceit. It’s as if Wright is trading in his high-lit reputation from Pride and Prejudice and Atonement for the sake of proving his mettle as an action director.

The result is not without success. For all its Grimm allegory, the film is like an alt-universe continuum of Luc Besson’s The Professional filtered into the visual stylings of Run Lola Run. (Hanna’s final act is also set in Berlin.)

The first 16 years of Hanna’s hardscrabble life take place in the wintery woods of Finland. There, Hanna (Saoirse Ronan, whom Wright directed in Atonement) and her father, Erik (Eric Bana), live in a spartan shack devoid of modern creature comforts. Erik has taught his daughter the fine art of bow hunting, hand-to-hand combat, multilingualism, and a virtual memorization of the encyclopedia.

All this preparation is a prelude for a nebulous mission targeting Marissa (Cate Blanchett, doing her best Tilda Swinton impersonation), a fastidious, hard-edged CIA operative who shares an unpleasant past with Erik and a mysterious connection with Hanna. Once Hanna decides she is ready to leave the roost, it triggers a chase to kill Marissa before she can return the favor.

For all Hanna’s superhuman fighting skills, her sheltered upbringing makes her ill-prepared for life outside the forest, or even basic human interaction. She flees her first night in a hotel room in terror, petrified by the technological cacophony sounded by whirling ceiling fans, showers, televisions, and an electric teakettle.

And, although the film couches Hanna’s affinity for Sophie (Jessica Barden) – a glib Brit teen traveling through Morocco with her hippy parents – as vaguely sexual, it is actually the awkward reactions of a pubescent girl struggling to understand, much less cope with, an unfamiliar rush of feelings.

Hanna ends up with a chase through Berlin’s now-defunct Spreepark, notably its replica Grimm Haus. Indeed, all the metaphor-making quickly elbows out any emotional grace notes. Hanna is the fairy-tale princess, Goldilocks, and Red Riding Hood rolled up into one pint-sized Nikita. Meanwhile, Blanchett’s Marissa is a mash-up of the wicked stepmother/witch and Big Bad Wolf – there’s an unfortunate trip to grandma’s house and other delicious kitsch like the row of electric toothbrushes Marissa uses to scrub her incisors until the gums bleed. The better to eat you with, my dear?

Neil Morris

*Originally published at http://goo.gl/8nAdO

Atonement

This time, I'm walking the plank Oscar-style.

Grade: B +
Starring: Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai, Brenda Blethyn, and Vanessa Redgrave
Rating: R
Running Time: 2 hours, 10 minutes

As the annual, awards-season serving of British Drawing-Room Drama™, Joe Wright’s Atonement is a burnished, largely gorgeous literary adaptation that, like No Country for Old Men, is a superb exemplar of the technical craft of filmmaking overshadowing the importance of a sound, seamless narrative underpinning.

Admittedly, condensing Ian McEwan’s acclaimed, complex novel for the screen is no small task, one assigned to the quill of Christopher Hampton, who previously adapted screenplays for Dangerous Liaisons and The Quiet American. The structure of McEwan’s four-part narrative remains, beginning with the marvelous exposition given to the vital opening act set during 1935 at the bucolic Tallis family country estate.

It is then and there that the story is set in motion, when young Briony (Saoirse Ronan), a budding writer and vaguely eerie pre-teen, witnesses, with crucially limited comprehension, the awkward dalliance between Cecilia (Keira Knightley), her older sister, and Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), the son of the family’s housekeeper. Briony’s grasp of their byplay is colored by both her restricted vantage-point and her latent attraction for Robbie, one of many subtexts – including an Upstairs-Downstairs cultural divide – that get washed away in the wake of McEwan/Hampton’s hydra-headed storyline.

More misperceptions and misunderstandings follow, fueled by Briony first reading a saucy note Robbie inadvertently sends to Cecilia and later stumbling across their ensuing coitus in the family’s library. The stage is thus is set when the jealous, confused Briony falsely accuses Robbie of raping her young cousin, who is also staying in the household. Robbie is subsequently disgraced and imprisoned, but even worse, from the viewpoint of the romantic movie universe, the star-crossed lovers are forcibly separated.

What keeps Atonement afloat, besides some fine performances from McAvoy and Knightley, is Wright’s creative camerawork and sublime attention to detail. Wright paints a captivating canvas throughout the first act, balancing a time-jumping narrative with sumptuous photography. Having now thrice directed Knightley—together with Pride & Prejudice and her current television commercial for Chanel's Coco Mademoiselle perfume—Wright so lavishly photographs his muse that the mere act of removing her foot from a shoe in anticipation of lovemaking is transformed into a display that is both titillating and exquisite (in interviews, Knightley reveals that Wright actually storyboarded the moment).

Wright’s artistry reaches its zenith at the start of act two with a five-minute-plus Steadicam shot across France’s Dunkirk beach circa 1940, the jumping-off point for retreating British soldiers waiting to be rescued from the German Blitzkrieg. The sequence is not only a grand mise en scène—comprising 1,000 extras and assorted ship mockups, vehicles and horses—but deftly traverses the many faces of war’s dismal circus: death, heroism, depravity, patriotism and chaos.

Unfortunately, this meticulously executed scene is also a pivot point for the narrative’s slide into banality and strained import. While part one is a portrait of atmosphere and character development, the rest of the film feels compressed and predictable, replete with de rigueur regrets and recriminations. The film’s middle acts dramatize the reunion of Cecilia and Robbie, who enlists with the British Army in exchange for his early release from prison. We also encounter an 18-year-old Briony (now played by Romola Garai), who works as a nurse in London, performing hard, gruesome labor—less out of patriotic duty, we sense, than to atone for the wrong she inflicted upon Robbie and her sister.

It is the final act, however, where Atonement reaches highest yet falls shortest. In McEwan’s book, this fourth part, written from the perspective of an older Briony in 1999, is the most audacious. It elucidates the often porous barrier separating fiction and reality, existing in both the hands of an artist and the minds of the audience, which forces the reader to confront the same perils of perception that beset young Briony.

Wright missteps (undoubtedly due to length and budgetary considerations) by altering the novel’s narrative frame – a family reunion in the present-day Briony’s honor – to a nondescript television sound stage where Briony (Vanessa Redgrave), now a successful novelist in her 70s, is being interviewed about her latest book. The milieu feels detached from the rest of the story, as does Redgrave’s charismatic, erudite elocution from Briony’s earlier muted, even obtuse personas.

The artist’s battle with the creative process and the balancing act between reality and fantasy have been tackled onscreen often and recently with more aplomb (Swimming Pool) and originality (Adaptation; Stranger Than Fiction). Atonement’s epilogue comes off more as an afterthought, a footnote to the Brit-lit period piece it yearns to preserve… at least until the end of Oscar season.

Neil Morris