Amanda Shubert’s essay “Love in Excess: Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina” takes two of Wright’s film adaptations, Pride and Prejudice (2005) and Atonement (2007), and perceptively compares and contrasts them to Anna Karenina (2012).
According to Shubert, Anna Karenina is a “mess” compared to Wright’s two previous film adaptations. Shubert claims:
The Russian aristocracy may have lived for style, but in Wright’s movie, style becomes its own object, indolent and over-indulged. By reading Tolstoy’s drama as meta-drama, he winds up with melodrama.
Shubert’s essay on Anna Karenina is a fascinating read that explores the problems with how literary style and form are represented on the screen.