Anna Karenina (2012)

I’ve not read Tolstoy’s phone-book thick novel “Anna Karenina,” but I know how Russian love stories end. Not well. The same holds true for Joe Wright’s Brit-heavy adaptation with Keira Knightley (they also did “Atonement” together) as the title aristocrat who rips late 19^th century rules and has an affair with an army officer (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) to the anger of her bureaucrat husband (Jude Law). This is a wild-card visual beauty that plays on the Shakespeare adage that, “All the world’s a stage...” Much of the movie is set inside a theater with the characters moving from the stage out into the audience and up through rafters and balconies, sets changing around them. Scenes set at a farm where true love and hard work abound are shot with no artifice. Yes, Wright is saying the wealthy are fake, while the people of the land are true. Pretentious? I dug it. It’s the love triangle that disappoints: Taylor-Johnson -– looking like he should be playing live guitar at the vegetarian restaurant three doors down from the theater I was at –- is miscast as the officer who women swoon for. The scandalous romance, then, pales beside the sets and music. B-