Avis des critiques

I dislike the film, but it's hard to begrudge those who like it (it got excellent reviews); it's ambitious, original and tries for something imaginative. It's also a mess, a half-baked farrago of bad ideas (and a couple of good ones). Chief among the bad ideas is the theatrical conceit of having the film unfold on a stage – though not consistently,

Never shy about tossing off a purposeless tracking shot where no one asked for it, Wright conceives of this boundless space as a place where he can move his camera at will and constantly, but more often than not in this boring spectacular, it seems like he's got the thing pointed in the wrong direction. He's assembled a large cast of performers who try their best, but Wright's conceit overwhelms all, thus rendering inert and lifeless two of the most powerful romances in literature.

Wright, with flat and flavorless images of an utterly impersonal banality, takes Tolstoy's plot and translates it into a cinematic language that's the equivalent of, say, Danielle Steel, simultaneously simplistic and overdone.

After he'd finished reading Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, did director Joe Wright scribble on the last page, "Needs more pep?"... Welcome to Joe Wright's Anna Karenina: The Musical. No one actually sings, but from the proscenium-arch opening on the adulterer Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen) scurrying down a well-upholstered hallway in search of fun, to its final shots of noble peasants rhythmically scything, the movie sets out to deliver Broadway dazzle.

Is this the definitive "Anna Karenina," the best of the dozen or so adaptations going clear back to Garbo and the silent era? I don't know about that, but it's a furiously ambitious literary adaptation, the best of Wright and Knightley's careers, that tries to make us feel the intense sexuality and terror and grief of a classic novel, and to force us to face its questions about love and marriage and agree that we still can't answer them.

[Jude Law's] stillness is commanding, curtly conveying both Karenin's fineness as a man and impossibility as a mate. Just as the characters created by Tolstoy the artist got the advantage of Tolstoy the polemicist—at least until the end of his life—so these confoundingly good performances gradually win the movie from Wright's puerile conceit, giving us an Anna Karenina if not for the ages, than at least for an evening.

It never feels like we're watching people pressed on by the burdens of society and history, just extravagantly costumed puppets navigating Wright's colorfully shallow bag of tricks.

As an adaptation of a 19th-century literary property about love stifled by society strictures, the film contains far more passion and a tad more complexity than the dominant and typically more staid model of middlebrow costume drama—not to mention loads of extra aesthetic frippery.

I found this all wildly effective, though it isn't hard to imagine someone put off by the blatant artificiality, which can be emotionally distancing... Still, while the craft goes a long way, it's the emotions that resonate long after the curtain falls. Anna's passion, fierceness and tragedy remain intact, affirming the novel's timelessness. Here is what Doctor Zhivago strove for, at long last accomplished.

[Part of the] problem is the star. If Knightley's propensity for face-pulling suited her rendering of sexual hysteria in A Dangerous Method, here it reveals a lack of sophistication. Jude Law shows much greater depth as Karenin and is not unsympathetic as a cuckold doing what he can to salvage his pride in an unforgiving society. The look is gorgeous, of course, but seldom has so much aestheticization served so much heartlessness.

A travesty with a miscast Keira Knightley that is tragic only in its conception and execution.

Meanwhile, the classic tale of a wayward mom, Anna Karenina, finds new expression in Joe Wright's swirling, elaborately choreographed version of it—a headache for all its vividness.