Anna Karenina (2012)

Artificial Intelligence
or
Anna! Karenina! The! Musical!

Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" is considered by many the greatest novel ever written, and has been adapted so many times (two of them starring Greta Garbo!), one is tempted to name any version "The Last Remake of Anna Karenina."  So, the task for director Joe Wright and scripter Tom Stoppard must have seemed daunting, or as one of Zsa Zsa Gabor's later husbands stated it: "You know what you have to do, you just have to find a way of making it interesting."

Well, this one is interesting, alright.  And it hues closely to Tolstoy's novel in the way that a CliffsNotes Edition sticks close.  All the plot points are there, the characters whittled down to their bare essences, or eliminated altogether, and breezily delivered in a theatrical manner, save some significant exceptions.  Truth is, Wright makes this version of Anna Karenina the way Baz Luhrmann would, as a grand, operatic experience staged in an extraordinarily choreographed with the emphasis on the "arch" (as in "playfully and affectedly roguish") in Proscenium Arch.
  

Jim Emerson had a fascinating article (based around Skyfall) on his "Scanners" blog on the difference between a "theatrical" film and a theatrical film and its use of space as defined by the limitations of the frame and a stage directors' tendency to reflect that frame with its own limitations resembling the dimensions of a stage.  Wright fully embraces that concept and goes further; for the main story of the hoi-polloi and their social and political gamesmanship, all of the action takes place within the false spaces of a theater (at times even using the rafters as locations for traditional street-scenes): train and carriage scenes are decidedly set-bound with no effort made to reflect a "real" world outside the windows; transitions are made "in-camera" without editing, so a very stagy and choreographed bureaucratic work set-up with synchronized rubbing stamping (set to Dario Marianelli's interesting score) segues to a restaurant scene by merely having the "extras" trade in their black business suits for waiter-whites; a formal society ball is not an intricate commingling of dancers that Wright so effectively engineered in Pride and Prejudice, but is an elaborate ballet, where the participants barely touch and their hand movements are intricately swanning in nothing that approaches a traditional dance (at times, to keep track of the principals, the foreground dancers in our field of vision "freeze" to better make out the focus of our attention).  Like Francis Ford Coppola's set-bound version of Bram Stoker's Dracula, It's all very elaborate, "stagey," false, and at times clever but, a lot of the time, merely "showy," like a musical with no libretto, something to separate this "Anna" from the more realistic, even if filmed in-studio, versions.  

The performances run that way, too.  Keira Knightley is an exasperating Anna, conflicted but fatally committed to fully expressing whatever is on the surface of her heart.  Her P & P co-star, Matthew McFadyen is a burlesque cousin Oblonsky, fatuously showy in a way that reminds of Kevin Kline performing a burlesque role.  Jude Law—not one of my favorite performers—here is exceptional as Anna's cuckolded husband, and is so restrained and non-theatrical, that it sets him apart from almost every other performer, isolating him, and is a good short-hand way of showing why Anna might be dissatisfied with him.  Olivia Williams has a small part as the Countess Vronsky, whose son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is the very florid object of fascination for Anna.

Anna (Keira Knightley) runs from Vronsky at the Ball
and experiences a little fore-lightening from an approaching train.
It's dangerous in a Joe Wright theater.

But, almost the entire film is deliriously fascinated with the artificial that it undercuts the very real passion and consequences of actions of the people in the film, reducing them to "players" as opposed to human beings.  I say "almost" because Wright does change things up to "open up" the segments featuring Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) and Kitty (Alicia Vikander), who already have their disappointing encounter with Vronsky and move on.  When they reunite, their segments are set in a real world of sky, clouds and fields befitting the couple who exemplify wisdom, forbearance and patience.  Wright puts them in our world, relegating the others to an artificial world that is essentially stage-managed (even at the end with a coda of Karenin and the remains of his family, it is contained in the stage-world that Wright has chosen to house his film.

It's different, even interesting in an oddly disrespectful manner, as the flightiness of the bourgeoisie and their concerns are merely shadow-play and window-dressing—it is true to an extent—but by pushing the metaphor so aggressively, it undercuts any feeling one has for the players in the majority of the film itself, and reveals itself as resembling the tut-tutting of the hypocrites who turn against Anna.  I'm not sure that Tolstoy had that intention (even strained through Stoppard), and this film might have benefited  from a less facile presentation that required less stage-craft and something more resembling (I don't know) empathy?

Anna Karenina is a Cable-Watcher.

Hanna

"Grimm's Fairy Spy"
or
"Better Living Through Chemical Brothers"

Hanna isn't like any movie you've seen, if you managed to miss some of the more stylish spy thrillers at the end of the 1960's.  When the spy-craze went more mainstream more A-list directors started to get into the fray and suddenly the thrills started to be taken over by style as those film-makers attempted to impose some of their own creative instincts into the genre.  Sometimes the results were a sub-par thriller, others were just plain pretentious.  Some...were interesting (like this one is, and like The American was last year).

Joe Wright is one of the better British directors coming out BBC television work.  He's done his bit for the classics, old and new (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement) quite deftly handling the drawing room choreography and even putting a nicely modern spin on things.  But, his 2009 film of The Soloist showed a director who wanted to experiment with the form, break out of the stodgy "Beeb" way of doing things and shake the story-telling up a bit (in that film, he turned Los Angeles into a living, breathing, rumbling sci-fi character looming over its strata of citizenry).  It was interesting to see him attached as director to what looked like a common "actioner," and one wondered what he might bring to it, given his three previous films and how he appeared to be changing his style.

Change it, he did.  Hanna is a weird mixture of gloss and QT-perversion, with some very strange camera work that, somehow, never manages to not tell you what is going on, to whom, where and why.  No matter how over-the-top the theatrics become, Wright never forgets the basic job of keeping the audience informed, and with a screenplay spare on details and depending on the visual to tell the story, his discipline is critical (imagine, for instance, if Tom Hooper had directed it!) for any basic understanding of the film.  Hanna  heaps on the atmospherics, not only with a brazen fairy-tale sub-text, but an all-encompassing sound-design/Euro-electronica musical score by The Chemical Brothers,* that recall some of the '60's/'70's work of such composers as Mikis Theodorakis and Giorgio Moroder.  But the thumping, edgy noises permeate the entire soundtrack, not just the music, from the sweet tune that one of the Hanna-hunters (Tom Hollander, cast completely against type) whistles, quite nullifying any element of surprise,** to the pounding chase music that keeps the attention focused while Wright spins his camera or shifts perspective, *** to the creepy metal noises and animal sounds that permeate this world. 

It begins in Finland, in the snow as a caribou is being hunted by a lone figure in fur.  She dispatches the animal with one arrow shot ("I just missed your heart"), and begins to dress the animal for food.  "You're dead!" says a figure behind her, and a rapid brutal fight breaks out, dependent less on fast editing than rhythm, and she is soon slammed to the ground, a snow angel against her will.  "Drag the deer back yourself," says the man, who it turns out is Hanna's father (Eric Bana).

She is Hanna Heller (Saoirse Ronan—pronounced "Seersha"—and she worked with Wright in Atonement, and specifically asked that he direct this) and it is all survivalist training.  Hanna has been raised to live on the land, kill and cook her own food, have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything (except electronics, apparently) given that her schooling is from the encyclopedia, speak several languages and have a detailed history that is nothing like her own.

What is her history?  What is her father's?  We don't get too deep into the film before we learn he's a rogue security agent gone missing, and he's a bee in the bonnet of Marissa Viegler (Cate Blanchett—imagine her being creepy and then go a few steps further), an operative high up the chain of command.  And she is Hanna's target.  And Hanna must get to her before Marissa can find her.  The why's will come, eventually, but already we've invaded a fairy-tale landscape with the sheltered princess (who can snap your neck) and an evil step-mother who stays only a few evil steps behind the whole movie.  And given Ronan's goose-like grace throughout the film, one can't help but call to mind all sorts of folk-tales of changelings and bargains and revenge.  But it's a spy thriller, too, as cold as they come, so don't expect "happily ever after."

For me, it was a simple story told well that impressed me throughout.

But it just missed my heart.

BANG!  Hanna is a Matinee.


* Their impact on the film is incredible.  I kept imagining what the film would be like with a "standard" thriller score, and always came up with a duller, less propulsive film.

** This recalls Peter Lorre's child killer in Fritz Lang's M (1931).  Hollander vaguely recalls Lorre's look, and, later,  Wright stages a fight to the tune "M" whistled from Peer Gynt—"In the Hall of the Mountain King," (after The Social Network, this piece is getting a lot of traction).

*** "What does music feel like?" Hanna asks at an early stage of the script.  Here, it feels like having a heart attack in zero-g.  One of the reasons this film DOESN't have a traditional score is that Hanna, the character, doesn't know music, and as we're following her struggles, the music reflects her mood, whether placid or on the run.  It's rather interesting where those moods show up.

The Soloist

The Soloist (Joe Wright, 2009) The Los Angeles of Joe Wright's The Soloist is an alien landscape of clover-leaved asphalt, caves of concrete, and dwellings like jail-cells, overlain with a constant muffled roar, punctuated with neon- and police-bar-lit nights through which the homeless meander in surrealist tableaux that would give Federico Fellini pause.

In this environment, while recovering from a nasty bicycle accident Los Angeles Times feature reporter Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) is contemplating another failed idea for a column, when he hears, echoing, a high sonority piercing the white noise.  It emanates from Nathaniel Anthony Ayers (Jamie Foxx)—homeless, schizophrenic, sawing out pure tones from a violin with only two strings, the sounds of the others only imagined in Ayers' head.  It's the stuff human interest columns are made of: a Julliard drop-out, cast adrift amidst the flotsam and jetsam on economic beachrocks, whose music cuts through the din.  Soon, Lopez's column puts a face on the L.A. homeless community (numbering 90,000) and the public responds, including the donation of a no-longer-used bass-cello, Ayers' original instrument, and Ayers' simple existence gets complicated.

Joe Wright has made two rarefied films set in the English gentry (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement), but this urban tale of harmony amidst grinding chaos, propels his gifts into a new arena.  No longer able to settle on the classical symmetry of English estates, this film is jagged, off-kilter, and sonically and visually complex, both in exterior spaces and in the echoing interiors of Ayers' mind.  Music soon supplants the chattering roar of the film, softening and simplifying it, finally allowing it to soar, sometimes literally, evoking the peace that soothes Ayers' mind.  But those moments are all-too brief, as the two men are both impacted by each other's demons.  

That jagged, off-kilter quality is also necessitated by the editing rhythms Wright is forced into by his principal stars, two of the better "riffers" of the current crop of young actors.  Downey, Jr. and Foxx intersect each other, the latter, in a constant stream of focused non-sequiturs, while the former interjects whenever he can, like Ayers' music trying to find structure in the jumble of words and thoughts.  The editing of their scenes together is tight and, frankly, a little daunting to consider how difficult it must have been.  Like the rest of the film, it succeeds if, in not bringing order to chaos, it offers a respite from disorder. 

Mr. Ayers

Pride and Prejudice

"Pride and Prejudice" (Joe Wright, 2006) Can there be anything more done with "Pride and Prejudice"--the jewel in the Jane Austen tiara? Turns out, yes, there can. Joe Wright takes some of the stuffing out of the novel and makes it move in its own frenetic dance for the first 3/4 of it. The dances and balls are choreographed and photographed to maximum effect, sometimes sublimely comic, and the ways the mating rituals and business marriages are carried out intersect with Wright's searching, shifting camera moves. And then, in moments that Austen would call "high dudgeon" the camera stops and Nature takes over, culminating in two eerie scenes--one, a confrontation between Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightley) and her object of obsession Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen) staged in an unyielding Greco-Roman pogoda during a thunderstorm, and later during a bizarre shot where Elizabeth, locked in emotional and physical paralysis, spends an uncertain day in one spot as the sun and Nature move around her, a fascinating way to pull off her receiving Darcy's letter of regret without really receiving him. Sometimes, Wright goes a bit too far blowing the dust off this classic--a spinning camera from Elizabeth's point of view on a swing seamlessly, and a little nauseatingly, shows the passing of time. And he can't resist a "money shot," a gorgeous, overly dramatic shot of Elizabeth on cliff-top, ensuring that her new perspective on things is in Panavision. But he's also aided immeasurably by extremely naturalistic performances (including Brenda Blethyn and Donald Sutherland) from an ensemble encouraged to stumble over each other's words to take the starch out, and from a mercurial performance by Keira Knightley, whose Elizabeth goes from apple-cheeked gushing teenager to stormy-eyed character assassin in hardly a blink.

Atonement

"See You Next Thursday..."

"Atonement" is Joe Wright's masterful film of Ian MacEwan's novel about the responsibilities of authorship and ownership. A tricky novel to adapt, it manages to become just as valid as a film as it does on the printed page. Wright's last film was the umpteenth adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice" and both he and Keira Knightly managed to make the adaptation relevent and seem needed, though Wright, in an effort to breathe life into it, would sometimes go a bit overboard in his camera tricks.

Here he's much more assured, still suffusing the film with a restless energy, but also getting out of the way of the actors when the drama goes quiet. His "big trick" this time is a five minute continuous shot of the beach at Dunkirk that keeps time with the soldiers, dodges the vehicles in a panic, the muck and the mire, winds around a choir and gives you a hint of the simmering panic of the soldiers stuck on the last patch of land between the enemy and salvation. But, as he proves a master of space, Wright also plays with time and memory in "Atonement," sometimes starting the movie again a reel back to give you an added detail, another viewpoint, a fuller story than one unreliable narrator can provide. His camera snakes along with the particpants meeting them stride for stride in their careless haste, and ekeing out humor in the frailties and shows of civility. And if Wright's work isn't enough to bring home the point, Dario Marianelli's chattering, propulsive score provides a sonic counter-point, blending seamlessly with the sound design and characterizations.

Keira Knightley and James McAvoy (he's never been better) are getting the lion's share of acting accolades, but the true miracle of this movie are the trinity of actresses playing authoress Briony Tallis--Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai, and Vanessa Redgrave--at various stages of her life. They are united by their haunted eyes, seeking out the truth, desperate for comprehension...or what they accept as comprehension. Those eyes grow more feeble with age, more unsure and tremulous, and garners an empathy that helps leaven sympathies for the characters involved, and in doing so Wright provides an "Atonement" of his own.

"Atonement" is a full-price ticket