Anna Karenina (2012, Joe Wright)

Joe Wright's adaption of Tolstoy's enduring masterwork is a gliding, flamboyant, and overall shallow experience due to the director's placing of technical wizardry over building affinity with his characters. An unfortunate and frustrating recurring issue within the work of a clearly talented filmmaker that can be argued for this time round due to the trivial nature of the characters and desperate need to repackage a classic for modern digestion.

The tale of a socialite woman's decent into despair as she chooses a life of 'true love' to a young Count over her marriage to her statesman husband, is a timeless and still revelatory example of literature, much regarded as one of the greatest examples ever written. However, despite its profound lasting influence on not just literature but film and art in general, it would have been naive to play it straight when bringing Anna Karenina to the big screen. Audiences after all, especially those not familiar with Tolstoy's novel, may find the unfurling drama all too familiar as what makes the book so rich may seem conventional when translated to film. The approach taken turns the story into a kind of semi-stage play, an elaborate theatre house where the scenes psychically convert on screen before the viewers eyes as the characters roam and inhabit an enclosed performance space. Exterior shots are kept to a minimum with often peripheral details painted on the interior walls. The effect is often jarring, taking a short while to ease into though never stopping short of remarkable. This mode of storytelling makes for the most interesting component of Wright's film but also the source of its collapse in some respects.

Keira Knightly gives one of the strongest performances of her career as Karenina; as an actress she continues to climb great heights to lose her detractors, while she may have a lot more to prove, after her dazzling turn in A Dangerous Method and now this she is certainly developing as a performer and must be appreciated. Jude Law has similarly suffered from a hoard of critics throughout his career but likewise delivers a truly wonderful act as Karenina's good natured yet unloved husband Alexei. His character could so easily be construed as God fearing, a detached man devoid of emotion, obsessed with social standing. Given his screen-time and narrative function it's testament to Law's performance that he is felt to be so tragically human despite his seemingly idealist nature and rigid moral coding. His Alexei is full of compassion and love despite receiving none himself, ending up the most memorable and sympathetic character of this film's mighty ensemble. Aaron Johnson as Count Vronsky, the man who passionately falls for Anna and vice-versa, doesn't do much more than create a young ambitious militant man with shallow aspirations, but that was his function. The story, after all, is of a woman's search for contentment and truth in a society lost in fabrication and compromise; the technical inventiveness surrounding the characters, the exuberance of the living set piece they inhabit, portrays the superficial elegance of the city's high life. While juxtaposed against the story of Konstantin, close friend of Karenina's brother Oblonsky, and his quest to marry Kitty, Oblonsky's wife's younger sister,  a woman he truly loves, does the film refine itself. Refining itself to show the purity of Konstantin's rural life and sincerity of love compared to the damaging social mores of the city; a great theme in Tolstoy's work that is conveyed rather well here. In fact it's in these moments with Konstantin where the film works best, as we're ceased to be bombarded by the film's roller coaster effect and given the chance to invest rather than being forcibly removed from feeling. 

Martin Scorsese one said of his similarly themed The Age Of Innocence, that it was his most violent film, quite the opinion from 'the master of the mob movie'. Yet Scorsese's feelings towards his film rings true and here Joe Wright also does an excellent job of creating the social scrutiny felt by Anna Karenina after her affairs have been aired. The maliciousness of society is unleashed upon Tolstoy's 'Scarlet Woman' shown in the film through striking utility; during a horse race in which Anna unconsciously reveals her feelings towards Count Vronsky and at a restaurant where all eyes scrutinise her every move, Anna's shame is expressed with a Brechtian use of Tableaux Vivant as the room freezes and fixates on her. 

Adapting a novel of this magnitude was never going to be an easy task and to a degree Wright has pulled it off. Whether his clear technical adeptness as a director and his refusal to let us get too close to his characters is needed this time round is debatable, as this approach to his work has stifled past efforts. Atonement was more about the bigger picture of human lives than the personal intricacies of relationships, as was the case with Hanna. In the former, the example of how simple misunderstandings and the troublesome subjective viewpoint of personal experience can ruin lives was put forth. With Hanna the inevitable fears of parenthood and destruction of innocence in the world were played out at the expense of emotional investment. Perhaps this wouldn't be such sore spot if Wright's films weren't such platforms to show off his technical virtuosity as a filmmaker, because it only highlights his shortcomings as a storyteller. Whether his pitfalls actually help his Anna Karenina this time round, I'm not sure, but it certainly isn't the failure others have reported it to be. Is Anna Karenina a great film? Not by a long way. Is Joe Wright capable of making a great film? Yes, he just hasn't managed it yet but I know he's got it in him.

A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, 2012)

A Dangerous Method - the new film from notorious canadian auteur David Cronenberg, his first since 2007's Eastern Promises, and his third uniting with Viggo Mortensen charts the relationship between psychologists Sigmund Freud (Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) as they embark on the birth of psychoanalysis at the turn of the 20th century.

The story of Jung and Freud's fraught relationship and all their influence in the field of psychology is the perfect material for Cronenberg, you might even say he was born to make this film. So why is A Dangerous Method so unremarkable? Why is it such a sterile and underwhelming experience from one of the world's most exciting filmmakers?

With actors as assured and talented as Viggo Mortensen, Vincent Cassel, and man of the moment Michael Fassbender you can expect high levels of muscle flexing from these renowned thespians. Even Keira Knightley as the woman who complicates Jung and Freud's lives further holds her own in what could be a career best, though her performance isn't without its problems. The screenplay, written by Christopher Hampton and adapted from the play The Talking Cure flits about too much and doesn't focus and develop an area; inside there is a good movie trying to get out but the film's voice is lost and unfocussed and in the end feels tragically underdeveloped. It also suffers like so many other films adapted from plays do, in that the translation from stage so often doesn't gel and what we're left with is a very self conscious piece of film making. When you see an actor performing on stage you are very aware you are witnessing a 'performance', in film the results are so much more immersive unlesss it has any traces of Brechtian theatre involved, i.e. Goddard's Vivre Sa Vie (1962) or more recently Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997). A Dangerous Method feels like you're watching a play trying to be a film, the performances feel too knowing and so it's hard to fully divulge into the story despite the level of acting on show.

A Dangerous Method is very a much a part of the 'Cronenberg Project' in that it covers themes that run through his entire body of work - mainly sex and repression. Vincent Cassel's character speaks at length about sexual liberation and of course how can one not think of the chilling climax (no pun intended) in his debut Shivers (1975) . Even his more recent film Spider (2002) covers Oedipal complexes and trauma. So if Cronenberg is the perfect director for A Dangerous Method then why doesn't it suffice? It comes down to the fact that Cronenberg has always shown audiences images never imagined, these images were metaphors made flesh. In A Dangerous Method what we get is Freud and Jung developing psychoanalysis, an approach that was named The Talking Cure, and that is exactly what we get - a lot of talking. Normally at the end of a Cronenberg outing you have experienced something out of the norm, something only an auteur as unique and daring as Cronenberg could show us. Even in his crime dramas A History of Violence (2005) and the far from perfect Eastern Promises you know any other filmmaker wouldn't or couldn't go to the depths that Cronenberg went to, the emphasis he puts into the duality of mind and body. So its a shame that any number of directors could have made A Dangerous Method exactly what it is, or possibly even better.

Cronenberg's film isn't a failure, it's very much worth watching for the pure talent involved in it. What it is, is a disappointment that a film so unremarkable has come from such a remarkable director whose voice is normally so clear and un-compromised. Like the reputation of one of cinema's greatest visionaries, A Dangerous Method simply doesn't live up to its title.