Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina

Just in case you're having trouble keeping those adulterous, tragically fated 19th-century heroines straight in your mind, this is the one who throws herself under the train. In this latest film adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's great novel, Sophie Marceau (Braveheart) becomes the seventh actress to take the dive, following on the heels of, among others, Greta Garbo, Vivien Leigh, and Jacqueline Bisset. The reason this archetypal melodrama gets remade so often is clear to anyone who's ever experienced the book's eloquent, soul-enlarging meditation on the power of love. The story, about a rich country wife who escapes her stifling marriage through a hot but ruinous love affair, is boilerplate stuff that Tolstoy merely uses as fodder for his grand philosophical flights and descriptive genius. Rose succeeds to a point in realizing the author's intentions by salvaging key passages of narration from the viewpoint of a character named Levin, who is Tolstoy's alter ego in the story. He also demonstrates a sharp eye for key scenes where the novel finds symbolic power in the stark wintry beauty of Russia. Ice cracking in a frozen river coincides with Anna's decision to accept Count Vronsky as her paramour. And Levin's use of mindless harvesting work as a cure for a broken heart suggests that we can only find peace by escaping the prison of our egos. But for all his talent and good intentions, Rose gets tripped up by the same problem facing all adapters of Anna Karenina: You just can't escape the fact that neither Vronsky nor Anna are very sympathetic characters. He's a callous, self-indulgent mama's boy and she (at least in the late going) is a pathetic, laudanum-addicted mope. More interesting by far are Levin and Kitty, two less mercurial lovers whose own parallel romance represents a truer, more enduring face of love. This is less of a problem in a book which speaks with Tolstoy's voice and sees through his mind's eye. But film, with its inherently visual approach, can't help forcing the dull, maudlin details of Anna's doomed love to stand on their own dubious merits for long stretches. It doesn't help that Marceau, who's fared better with less intimidating roles, can't find a way to bring energy, complexity, or real pathos to her character. Chalk this film up as a noble failure from a director whose true abilities are better represented in 1994's Immortal Beloved. Plenty of others have taken their runs at the mighty Tolstoy and fallen short. And sometimes, pure audacity deserves respect, even if it's not fully rewarded.