Penny wise, Pound foolish

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I suggested to my family (on me) that we see Leo Tolstoy's tale of love and marriage in imperial Russia in a modern adaptation of Anna Karenina http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPGLRO3fZnQ

What a disappointment it was!  Having not seen any prior screen version and only reading the novel, the film opens with a shaky start as a staged performance and is disjointed.  I questioned who was playing whom and what their purpose was, and when the characters traipse across the stage, I couldn’t wait for the tale of doomed love to begin.

Although the visuals are often magical and overly-indulgent—the film is overtly theatrical and a few scenes are simply ridiculous.

The film like the book isn’t concerned with observing social etiquette—it's about raw, often uncontrollable passions, emotional and sexual betrayal, mixed-up people with mixed-up lives.

Keira Knightley stars as Anna, literature's most tragic adulteress. Jude Law is Anna's cold-hearted husband, Alexey Karenin, a statesman who is principled to the point of callousness.

Anna Karenina was not the book Tolstoy intended to write, but his thoughts turned increasingly to an incident that haunted him: A neighbor's mistress had thrown herself under a train after being jilted by her lover. From this tragic seed grew an epic of sex, duty, marriage, and moral regeneration that many consider the greatest novel ever written.

I expected more from filmmaker Joe Wright who gave audiences Atonement certainly the film that Ian McEwan's novel deserved. I left the theatre feeling jilted myself, for having thrown away good money on a stylized film with little character development.