If you google "Anna Karenina," the first return is the Wikipedia article on Tolstoy's novel. The next five returns all pertain to the current movie directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley and Jude Law. Under the header, "News for anna karenina," return #5 entices with the lede to a review of the movie in my hometown newspaper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune: "'Anna Karenina' rewires Tolstoy's classic tale of marriage-wrecking, reputation-ruining passion into a streamlined, sexy and playfully satiric. . . ."
These ellipses shall not be pursued by me. Why are movies based on novels you love always such a disappointment? Part of it is just that the medium doesn't translate. I mean, novels, if they are good, tend to be impressive linguistic performances. Movies, however, are made of pictures, not words. The example I always think of is from The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's short masterpiece and the inspiration for more than one star-studded stinker of a movie. There is a scene in the novel wherein Fitzgerald is describing the people who come to the lavish parties Gatsby throws, and he writes, of one of them: "Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face." That is a fine sentence for which there is no cinematic equivalent. The novel is as good as it is partly on account of the cumulative effect of Fitzgerald's hard, glittering prose. Meanwhile, the movies--their faces are blurred.
The cumulative effect attained by all the words that make the novel Anna Karenina is largely a function of just how many words there are. It's a very long novel in which, if you have a job and family duties, you can be sunk for weeks. When you're finally done, you miss the characters, which is an achievement that a movie cannot hope to match. Speaking of family duties, I think one of the many very memorable scenes in Anna Karenina occurs in Part 6, Chapter 16. Dolly, while traveling to Anna's house for a visit, has a conversation with a young peasant woman, who mentions that she recently buried a daughter. In response to Kitty's conventionally kind question, the woman says that it's all for the best, children are a burden, and anyway the "old man" already has enough grandchildren. Kitty is at first shocked by the coarseness of this, but, stewing over things as the carriage rolls along, her interior monolog is recorded by the greatest of novelists:
'And what is it all for? What will come of it all? I myself without having a moment's peace, now pregnant, now nursing, always cross and grumbling, tormenting myself and others, repulsive to my husband--I shall live my life, and produce unfortunate, badly brought-up and beggared children. . . . Well, supposing the best: that none of the other children die, and that I somehow succeed in bringing them up; at the very best they will only escape being ne'er-do-wells. That is all I can hope for. And for this, so much suffering and trouble. . . . My whole life ruined!' Again she remembered what the young woman had said. Again the recollection was repulsive to her, but she could not help admitting there was a measure of crude truth in the words.
I'm guessing that this is one small episode that doesn't make it into Joe Wright's smart and sexy update.
