But what is still lacking is a sense of depth or hinterland. Passion here comes across as petulance; frustration and longing as peevishness. Watching Knightley's Anna we never break free from a sense that this is one selfish, tiresome society wife in thrall to a silly infatuation. The effect, fatally, is that we don't care enough what happens to her, thus wiping out at a stroke the power of the climatic event, perhaps the one incident most people know about this story.
In fact there is a general lack of emotional involvement, which comes not from Tom Stoppard's economical, clean screenplay but from the particular and very singular treatment given the book by the director. Wright has presented the whole thing within the confines of an ornate but somewhat dilapidated theatre (well, not quite the whole thing — he cheats a couple of times when the action briefly breaks out into sunny rural landscapes). Whether or not this decision was purely artistic or dictated by budgetary limitations, the effect is to stylise a story which, with its particular romantic and tragic sweep, requires no such bells or whistles. If the intention was to emphasise the stuffy restraints imposed by 19th-century Russian aristocratic society, then it is very heavy-handed; most of us after all are familiar with the old convention-thwarts-true-love cliché and don't need it spelling out.
If however it was to make it more visually arresting, then it certainly succeeds. Velvety, crimson and gold-lined, it is as rich and rococo as anything Baz Luhrmann might produce — indeed a couple of times I was reminded of the similarly theatre-bound Moulin Rouge! There are some audacious moments, such as a horse race on stage, and it has its own kind of tatty elegance. We are impressed with the inventiveness of it. But do we really need Anna Karenina to be visually interesting in this sense? Why take an epic 950-page masterpiece with all the cinematic possibilities that offers, and make it small and stagey? The desire of a director to impose his "vision" on such material is not only not a good enough reason, it actively gets in the way.
Alongside Knightley the other players strutting their stuff on these cramped boards offer varying degrees of support. Matthew MacFadyen as Anna's womanising brother Oblonsky is engaging in a Falstaffian way, without having much to do, and, in sharp relief to the artifice around them, Domhnall Gleeson and Alicia Vikander as Levin and Kitty are touchingly real and sincere. But as Vronsky, Anna's dashing love-object, Aaron Taylor-Johnson seems hopelessly out of his depth. All breeches and blond hair, impossibly handsome and totally vacant, this Vronsky gives us no real clue as to why Anna would want to keep her famous appointment with the 6.30pm now arriving at platform one.
An honourable mention should however go to Jude Law, who a decade ago would have been playing Vronsky but was presumably deemed by central casting to be past it now. This actor, possibly one of the vainest in contemporary movies, has been "uglied up" to play Anna's boring and cold-blooded husband Karenin, and a good job he does of it, to his credit. He occupies the still centre of the film, and by the end of it, if not exactly rooting for him you're certainly reassessing him as potential husband material. Which surely tells us that this time round, something has gone badly wrong in the retelling.
