Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina - Dir. Joe Wright (2012)

Joe Wright is no stranger to adapting literary classics. He made his feature film debut with a big screen version of Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice. Wright followed that up with an adaptation of Ian McEwan's Atonement, which was nominated for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. After delving into sappy Hollywood territory with The Soloist, Wright went off the beaten path with Hanna, an action film with elements of Grimm fairy tales and Jason Bourne espionage. Now, he's returned to his bread and butter with Anna Karenina, based on the epic novel by Leo Tolstoy.

Anna Karenina (Keira Knightley) is a wealthy socialite living in St. Petersburg with her older husband, Alexei Karenin (Jude Law), an influential statesman, and their son, Serhoza (Oskar McNamara). Anna reluctantly leaves her boy for the first time for a trip to Moscow in order to mend the broken marriage of her brother, Stiva (Matthew McFadyen), and his wife Dolly (Kelly Macdonald). Dolly has thrown Stiva out of the house after learning of his affair with their governess. While in Moscow, Anna becomes instantly smitten to a handsome cavalry officer named Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). The attraction is mutual and the two engage in an illicit affair that is doomed from the moment they lock eyes. The passion is heated, but the once respectable Anna becomes the subject of catty gossip and sneering glances from her fellow bluebloods.

What sets Joe Wright's Anna Karenina apart from other cinematic versions is the director's use of stylized theatrical sets. The production was unable to afford shooting on location in Russia or the numerous locales that the story called for. Instead, Wright renovated an old theater outside London and dressed it up with help from production designer Sarah Greenwood.

As Shakespeare once wrote, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." Wright truly takes that to heart as the theatricality works to enhance the idea that Tolstoy's characters are forced to play roles to conform to societal mores. Wright makes no attempt to hide the floodlights, curtains, or pulley ropes. The aristocracy lives on stage and in the seats while the servants and lower classes exist only backstage or in the rafters. The film sometimes transitions from one scene to another by opening stage doors. Anna's trip to Moscow is depicted by a toy train chugging past model homes and miniature snow banks. Only rarely does the story venture into an actual exterior such as during sun-lit picnic shared by Anna and Vronsky. Wright has become known for his tracking shots and he doesn't disappoint here. Wright glides the camera around the stage as extras move to and fro while stagehands alter the set. The intricate choreography will recall Alexander Sokurov's technical marvel, Russian Ark.

The sumptuous costumes and set design are almost enough to distract from the overwrought drama that is almost emotionally devoid. It's a difficult proposition to distill Tolstoy's prose into a palpable movie. Even at over two hours, the screenplay by Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love) still shortchanges the various storylines.

Anna Karenina is one of the great tragic figures in classic literature, but without fully developing her storyline, she doesn't come off in a sympathetic light. Meanwhile, Jude Law's Alexei isn't portrayed in stereotypical fashion as a brute. He's stodgy, yet caring and ultimately forgiving. The love triangle entrapping Anna, Alexei, and Vronsky run parallel with two other love stories that have generally fallen to the wayside in other adaptations. Cultural hypocrisy is highlighted by the contrasts between Anna's ostracizing and the lack of consequences for Stiva's frequent dalliances. While Dolly is asked to absolve her adulterous husband, Anna is allowed no such courtesy. Yet, Stiva is played up as something of a buffoon and most of his scenes have the manic energy of a screwball comedy, which never gels with the tragedy that is about to come. The third storyline focuses on Stiva's sister-in-law Kitty (Alicia Vikander) and her courtship by the meek Konstantin Levin (Domhnall Gleeson), a nobleman who has chosen to live in the countryside away from big city life. Levin was an analogue for Tolstoy who shares his creation's humble nature. The shy Levin and Kitty share a tender moment as they attempt to communicate with each other by using building blocks. However, their romance would mean a lot more had the filmmakers found a better balance between each love story.

Joe Wright's Anna Karenina is a bold re-imagining of Tolstoy's novel that is aesthetically pleasing, but lacking in emotional weight.

Rating: ** (*****)

War Horse

War Horse - Dir. Steven Spielberg (2011)

It's been three years since Steven Spielberg's last directorial effort in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. He returned with a vengeance at the end of 2011 with his two latest pictures hitting theaters within days of each other. They couldn't be any more different. The first was The Adventures of Tintin, a kinetic boys' adventure utilizing the latest in motion capture animation and released in 3D. The other, War Horse, is an old-fashioned epic shot in 35mm that references numerous Hollywood classics.

War Horse is based on a 1982 children's novel by Michael Morpurge, which was adapted into an award-winning stage play in 2007. Spielberg attended a show and was inspired to turn it into a movie with help from screenwriters Richard Curtis (Bridget Jones' Diary, Love Actually) and Lee Hall (Billy Elliot). Each permutation chronicles the events of World War I as seen through the eyes of a courageous horse.

The film opens in Dover, England with Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine) enraptured by a newly born colt. Albert lives in a farmhouse with his mother Rose (Emily Watson) and father Ted (Peter Mullan), a Boer War veteran trying to wash away his traumatic memories with alcohol. Ted rashly purchases the colt for triple his worth mainly to spite his overbearing landlord (David Thewlis), who rightly points out that the horse is too small to plow fields. It was born for show, not work. However, a determined Albert bonds with the newly named Joey and gets him to plow their rocky land. When a rainstorm washes away their crops, Ted has no choice but to sell Joey to the British army in order to pay their overdue rent.

Joey is put into the care of Captain Nicholls (Tom Hiddleston) and marches into battle alongside Maj. Stewart (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his black stallion Topthorn. After a failed charge against a German regiment, the horses are put into the care of two underage boys, Gunther (David Kross from The Reader) and Michael (Leonard Carow) serving in that same unit. From there, Joey and Topthorn wind up in the possession of an ailing French farm girl (Celine Buckens) and her doting grandfather (Niels Arestrup). Meanwhile, Albert enlists in the military as soon as he comes of age hoping to be reunited with his beloved friend.

War Horse represents Steven Spielberg at his best and his worst. It is an extremely well-crafted film gorgeously shot by Janusz Kaminski. The visuals are impeccable with numerous striking shots that capture the horrors of war and the beauty of the era. War Horse begins in an idyllic countryside that Spielberg has accentuated and romanticized in the way John Ford did with the countries of Wales in How Green Was My Valley and Ireland in The Quiet Man. The film culminates with a beautiful shot of silhouetted figures against a blazing orange sunset ala Gone with the Wind. Another shot features a battlefield strewn with the corpses of soldiers and horses which also recalls that same picture.

Spielberg can't help but go for the jugular when it comes to the film's most emotional moments. No heartstring is safe as Spielberg puts children and animals in peril in an attempt to wring every tear from every eye in the audience. If you didn't know how to feel about a certain scene, John Williams' overwhelming and hammy score will make sure to tell you. One of the best sequences in War Horse is an episode where Joey runs over and through the British trenches and gets tangled up by barbed wire in no man's land. One soldier from both sides declares a temporary truce to cut him loose. It's a touching moment, but Spielberg can't end the scene without the German calling Joey a "remarkable horse." This is a point Spielberg feels needs to be hammered home every fifteen minutes.

The acting is solid with Spielberg putting together an excellent cast of English and European thespians. Jeremy Irvine doesn't make much of an impression as Albert and he tends to overplay it during the more emotional moments. Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch turn in solid performances as the stiff upper lip British officers. The best performance in the film belongs to Peter Mullen as Albert's defeated father. Mullen probably isn't familiar to most American audiences, but he's appeared in darker, powerhouse roles in The Red Riding Trilogy and Paddy Considine's directorial debut Tyrannosaur.

War Horse attempts to be a treatise on the brutality of war as well as an uplifting family friendly drama and Spielberg has a difficult time blending the two. The episodic nature means the tone changes from All Quiet on the Western Front to National Velvet without notice. Maybe I'm cynical, but Spielberg's saccharine sentimentality didn't play well with me.

Rating: ** ½ (*****)

Synecdoche, New York

Synecdoche, New York - Dir. Charlie Kaufman (2008)


"The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth - it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true." - Jean Baudrillard

In his treatise, Simulacra and Simulations, Jean Baudrillard hypothesized that we (as a modern society) no longer live in the real world, but rather, a simulated version that has become more real than reality. That sort of rumination on the nature of reality has become a trademark in the films of Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Never has this been more prevalent than with Synecdoche, New York, the latest meta-textual mind twister by the scribe behind Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Synecdoche marks the directorial debut of Kaufman and it is the screenwriter’s most personal film yet. It is a film that is nearly as obfuscated as its title.

The title, Synecdoche, is both a play on the town of Schenectady and a reference to a figure of speech that is commonly used, but most people probably didn’t even know there was a name for it. There’s a lot of that going on in the film which is filled to the brim with symbolism and clever wordplay. Kaufman takes us on an existential journey of discovery that is anchored by another remarkable performance from Philip Seymour Hoffman. However, you can’t hinge your entire movie on just one actor, no matter how great he is. That is why Kaufman surrounds Hoffman with a bevy of talented actresses, each well-known on the arthouse circuit. There´s Catherine Keener, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Samantha Morton, Emily Watson, Michelle Williams, Dianne Wiest, and Hope Davis. I kept waiting for Laura Linney or Illeana Douglas to pop up.

Hoffman is the alliteratively named Caden Cotard, a theater director mounting Death of a Salesman, who becomes plagued by problems both physical and emotional. Caden suffers from various ailments such as blood in his stool, muddy urine, pustules on his face, and eventually violent seizures. After a mishap with the kitchen faucet, he’s bounced around from doctor to doctor, from ophthalmologist to neurologist. None of whom can tell Caden exactly what is wrong with him. There’s a distance growing between Caden and his bohemian wife Adele Lack (Keener) who, in a uniquely Kaufman fashion, paints portraits on miniature canvases that must be viewed through a magnifying glass. One day, Adele leaves for an art exhibit in Berlin with their daughter, Olive (Sadie Goldstein), and never comes back.

Caden tries to find comfort from his marriage therapist, Madeleine Gravis (Davis), but all she can do is shill her own self-help books. He bounces in and out of a relationship with Hazel the box office girl (Morton sporting red hair and plenty of cleavage). Hazel, by the way, buys a house that is perpetually on fire and dumps Caden for the realtor’s son who happens to live in the basement. No longer with Hazel, Caden bounces into a second marriage with his lead actress, Claire Keen (Williams).

Things seem to be going well when Caden is given the MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the ´genius grant.´ Caden sees this as an opportunity to put on a play about life, death, and everything. He rents out a massive theater that looks more like an airplane hangar and casts Claire as his star, a thinly veiled version of Hazel who eventually returns to Caden as his assistant. The years roll on, the cast grows by the hundreds, and the set grows into a scale replica of the city itself. The lines between reality and the play bleed further when Caden seeks out an actor to play himself. He finds Sammy (Tom Noonan) who has been observing Caden for a long time. He can be spotted in the background in several scenes. It gets even more confusing when Caden hires an actress (Watson) to play the Hazel to Sammy´s Caden. Then, Sammy hires an actor to play Caden while he directs him as Caden while the real Caden directs him. Err…at least; I think that’s how it’s supposed to go.

Time also plays an important factor. In the world of Synecdoche, it moves in a nebulous fashion. For Caden and the audience, minutes may pass, but it has actually been years. Months go by without notice in between bites at the breakfast table.

Kaufman has weaved a surreal world with idiosyncratic touches that might make Luis Bunuel proud. Synecdoche isn’t quite as fantastical as Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine. While there has always been an underlying layer of tragedy in Kaufman’s films, Synecdoche is far more bleak and pessimistic. Caden is a dying man desperate to leave his mark on the world. At the same time, his immense autobiographical play is a means for him to observe firsthand what he has done wrong with his loves and his life. On a more intimate level, Caden is a father searching not just for meaning in his life, but for a long-lost daughter. In one of the film´s more powerful scenes, Caden discovers an adult Olive (now working as a living tableau of tattoo art) dancing naked in a glass booth. He pounds the barrier between them only to be dragged away with Olive completely oblivious to his existence.

Synecdoche isn’t without its light moments. They are sprinkled throughout the narrative with humor so deadpan that they make deadpan look like the Marx Brothers. Yet the film can’t escape the gravity of its somber tone. Restless audience members will find what little patience they have tested by the methodical pace. Synecdoche easily veers into territory that is overly pretentious and Kaufman may not have had the most objective eye when it came to trimming the fat.

I wouldn’t call Synecdoche a total loss, not by a long shot. It is true there is quite a lot to chew on, but if you can get past it all, you’ll find something meaningful. I would definitely consider Kaufman to be one of the most important writers working in Hollywood today. A straightforward plot summary leaves out so much of the sublime elements in Kaufman’s magnum opus. It is a daunting film that will need multiple viewings to catch every little detail. It should go without saying that Philip Seymour Hoffman is wonderful, backed by an ultra-talented supporting cast and the final act is oddly affecting. If Kaufman had spent a few more hours in the editing room, Synecdoche would get a more wholehearted recommendation.

Rating: ** ½