ANNA KARENINA

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Resizing Tolstoy
Tom Stoppard’s Visible Magic Shines

The Tom Stoppard-scripted "Anna Karenina" opens with a virtuosic display of orchestrated one-take linear camera movement to transport the viewer from a backstage theatrical reality to an adaptable cinematic experience.

The daring bit of imaginative shape shifting goes on for an inordinately long period, thus forcing the audience to accept an element of theatrical artifice as part of the film’s due diligence to its source. Later in the first act, the result of a train accident snaps the story into reality with a gruesome example of mortality. We are firmly in the life of the movie now.

A tragic death establishes the romantic story’s underlying tragic tone. The title character’s participation as the unwitting cause of the accident sends a chill that corresponds to the freezing landscape of the story’s Russian setting.

Playing with form has always been one of Tom Stoppard’s trump cards as a playwright and screenwriter. His work on “Shakespeare In Love” was a revelation. Here, Stoppard knows where to let Leo Tolstoy’s 1873 novel fly, and also where to plant its earthbound aspects. The story is after all about a passionate adulterous affair that shatters the female half of the couple — Anna Karenina (beguilingly played by Keira Knightley). It is also about the kind of social and political hypocrisy that makes such errors in judgment grounds for punishment worse than prison.

Keira Knightley is a unique actress in that her natural openhearted disposition enables her to freely identify with a wide variety of characters via complete artistic freedom. Her generosity as an actress has a way of seeping into every crevice of any story. As Anna Karenina, Knightley is regal but never condescending. It doesn’t hurt that Knightley works again with simpatico director Joe Wright, with whom she made “Atonement” (2007). Some combinations of director and actor work like a charm. Wright’s confident direction never flags. His dramatically elevated characters keep their multiple identities of human, theatrical, and archetypal forms with a refreshing transparency.

Jude Law plays Anna’s cuckolded husband Karenin with a moral outrage that skews more British than Russian. The filmmakers make no pretense about this being a British translation of a Russian play. Reference the film’s elongated opening sequence. Prince Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) — a cavalry officer — is the object of Anna’s uncontrollable affection. Taylor-Johnson is ideally cast as a character who is at once sincere and yet too taken with his own youthful beauty to be loyal. The affair is so lopsided that even without previous access to the story, audiences will likely read the writing on the wall.

“Anna Karenina” is a visually lush film. As expected, the bejeweled costumes and oversized production designs are sophisticated beyond belief. Oscar nominations are certain. It is also an efficient telling of a great story. Stoppard’s deftness with handling a multitude of characters without allowing for any audience confusion is something of a wonder. Every character is thoroughly knowable. “Anna Karenina” shows all.

Rated R. 130 mins.

DOUBT

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Traces of Doubt

John Patrick Shanley's Play Stumbles In Transition to Film

Playwright John Patrick Shanley adapts his award-winning '60s era drama for the silver screen with mixed success. Shanley's narrative presents a double-edged problem by painting Catholic Priest Father Brendan Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) as a concerned good-guy to Meryl Streep's baleful Sister Aloysius who accuses the Father of impropriety with the school's only black student, Donald Miller (Joseph Foster II).

In light of the countless Catholic Priests that have been indicted on pedophilia charges in recent years, the material brings into question Shanley's motivations for writing what is a tacit apology for suspicions raised against male clergy. Convincing performances from Amy Adams (as Sister James), Meryl Streep, and Philip Seymour Hoffman do little to mitigate the material's buried agenda.

St. Nicholas Catholic School in the Bronx circa 1964 is the setting where Sister Aloysius oversees the school's populace of mainly young Irish and Italian junior high boys with a keen eye for their many means of misbehavior. The Sister goes so far as to advise the school's newest doe-eyed nun Sister James to keep a sharp watch out for any signs of impropriety.

As if on que, Sister James witnesses the jovial Father Flynn putting Donald Miller's dirty t-shirt in a locker after having sent for the altar boy during class. Suspicions boil into a full-blown accusation when Sister James reports the incident to Sister Aloysius along with other information about the Donald's class room behavior after the occasion, and the smell of liquor on his breath.

The construction of Shanley's play is purposefully tilted to leave out crucial information and scenes that would signify in one way or the other the foundation of the suspicion that we, as the audience, share with an antagonist that we are spoon-fed to dislike.

Streep's Sister Aloysius is a marvel of prudishness — she doesn't want allow a secular song like "Frosty the Snowman" on moral grounds — and her jealousy of the church's male-dominated hierarchy finds its way into every breath she emits. She proudly wears her brittle heart on her sleeve, while Father Flynn sends subtext power shots from the pulpit during his rousting sermons about things like intolerance.

The play's title comes from the central idea behind one of his sermons, and when Flynn takes to the pulpit to preach against gossip, he is able to convey the effect of Sister Aloysius's opportunistic attack on him.

As a piece of prime grade dramaturgy, "Doubt" is well-written enough to stir up delicate cocktail conversation about a Catholic Priest in the mid-sixties letting his school's only black student get away with stealing some altar wine, but serious cracks appear when the material alludes to character aspects the writer was unwilling to explore.

Had Father Flynn ever been accused of similar improprieties in the past? Did he know that Donald's mother was already identifying the boy as gay? And what does the boy have to say about any of this? Those questions are never answered. Did I need to see this movie to have them raised? Now I'm seeing where the doubt comes into play.

(Miramax Films) Rated PG-13. 104 mins.

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET

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Horror Show
Tim Burton Paints Sondheim Red
By Cole Smithey

Director Tim Burton’s screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 Grand Guignol musical is at once mesmerizing and disappointing.

Outstanding singing performances from its capable ensemble cast contrast unfavorably with Burton’s trademark affinity for a monochromatic color scheme of white, blue, brown, and gray.

Gallons of orange/red blood pour out beneath thankfully abbreviated songs performed in all-too-predictable orchestrations meant to cater to Broadway audiences familiar with the original Sondheim production. For such an idyllic gothic setting, Burton misses his cue to update the songs with orchestration, reharmonization, tempo, and key changes that could have corrected the music’s tendency to slip into a drone of same-sounding pitches.

Even with such musically backward attention paid to staying true to it’s pit orchestra limitations, Broadway traditionalists will likely chafe at screenwriter John Logan’s shortening of Sondheim’s script that cuts an hour from the play. Yet without Logan’s respectable effort, it is difficult to imagine that film audiences could withstand the material’s already redundant plotting.

The film begins aboard a London bound ship where fresh-faced youth Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower) sings the praises of the town upon the Thames as the greatest city in the world in "No Place Like London." Next appears Johnny Depp’s pale profile as Sweeney Todd, a renamed escapee from an Australian prison where the corrupt Judge Turpin (brilliantly played by Alan Rickman) erroneously sent him in order to steal away Todd’s lovely former wife and young daughter.

A shock of white hair (ala Dave Vanian of the punk band The Damned circa the "Phantasmagoria" album) cuts across Depp’s black hair and announces Sweeney’s vampire characteristics that blossom when he aligns himself with his former landlady, the widow Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter). Giant cockroaches scurry around Mrs. Lovett’s filthy and unoccupied pie restaurant where she woos Sweeney with a song about her disgusting sweet meat pies.

Lovett returns Sweeney’s box of well-kept razors from happier days and informs him of his late wife’s suicide. However clearly stated Sweeney’s mission is of slitting the throat of Judge Turpin, the crazed barber is prone to distraction and sets about killing untold numbers of men unlucky enough to wonder into his sparsely furnished barber shop above Mrs. Lovett’s bistro.

True to form, each member of the cast gets at least one musical set piece built neatly into the plot. Sacha Baron Cohen gives an especially enjoyable scene-stealing turn as a traveling elixir salesman and barber Adolfo Pirelli who takes distinct delight in publicly abusing his wigged child assistant Toby (Edward Saunders).

Sweeney publicly challenges Adolfo to an impromptu shaving duel that becomes more of a musical duet. The audacious display stirs Adolfo’s memory of Todd from before he was sent to prison, and dispatches Adolfo to unwittingly become Sweeney’s first victim when he attempts to extort the returning barber on Fleet Street.

Loosely based on a 19^th century stage play, "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" is a particularly bloody melodrama set to a decisively ‘70s Broadway sound. Tim Burton takes advantage of the gory material to press at the boundaries of its head-cracking, blood-spurting visuals and achieve a sublime brand of gothic horror that owes as much to the Hammer Dracula films of the ‘60s as it does to Stephen Sondheim.

There’s a pitch black humor here about revenge as an excuse for bloodlust. In the context of America’s Iraq/Guantanamo quagmire you could read Sweeney Todd as a merciful and equal opportunity executioner who recycles. Torture is beneath him.

Our hero is only interested in passionate murder on a grand scale, and yet he is a lazy serial killer. His victims must come to him, just as audiences must gravitate to a Christmas season of bloodletting to relieve the pressure of blood spilling all around us. In the words of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, "The spider spinning his web for the unwary fly. The blood is the life Mr. Renfield."

Rated R. 117 mins.