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Anna Karenina – review

I n Tolstoy , the theatre is often something to be mistrusted, both as art-form and social occasion, a place of absurdity and vanity either side of the footlights. Famously, the one thing he personally disliked in Chekhov was his habit of writing for the theatre, and said to him: "Shakespeare's plays are bad enough, but yours are even worse!" So it is an interesting, even subversive idea for screenwriter Tom Stoppard and director Joe Wright to have contrived an adaptation of Anna Karenina set in one place: a theatre.

Here is where the show and theatricality of high society is underlined, where the norms and hypocrisies of public life are conspicuous. Scenes will begin in the theatre building, on stage, or in an auditorium where the seats have been removed, often among costumed extras who will freeze like waxworks while the principals exchange dialogue. Or sometimes, characters will tensely quarrel backstage amid the ropes and pulleys controlling the scenery. This approach gives the scenes which really are set at the theatre a hyperreal quality, though the film's action will at times open out into the normal sets and outdoor locations of a regular adaptation.

It's a magic lantern effect, a rhetoric of unreality. The group scenes often make the film look like a musical without the songs. It sometimes has the effect of re-focusing our attention all the more sharply on to the performances, although I sometimes felt that it should either be done completely stylised or not at all, an absolute one-location movie, or a conventional one ranging far afield.

Keira Knightley is very good as Anna, suggesting a new subtlety and maturity in her acting. She is the artless wife and mother, married to a pinched and prim government official, Alexei Karenin. In this role, too, Jude Law gives a thoroughly intelligent performance. Bearded and bespectacled, he behaves like an ascetic or a priest who increasingly disapproves both of others' weakness and his own enforced tolerance. Anna has come to Moscow from her St Petersburg home on a mission of mercy: her scapegrace brother Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen) has been caught by his wife Dolly (Kelly Macdonald) having an affair with the family's former governess. (Oblonsky's is the unhappy family described in the book's famous opening sentence; where all happy families are alike, his is "unhappy in its own way".) Anna, with her delicacy and tact must speak to Dolly, persuade her to forgive and forget and keep the marriage together. Yet through an ironic wrench of fate, it is on this visit that she meets the mercurial and handsome young army officer, Count Vronsky, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson . There is a spark between them, and Anna finds herself set on a terrible, fateful path.

The film version skates over that other half of the story which concerns Oblonsky's friend Levin, played by Domhnall Gleeson, a wealthy idealist who has come to town to propose to the beautiful Kitty (Alicia Vikander), also being courted by Vronsky, but deeply wounded and downcast is forced to retreat to his country estates and find some consolation in pursuing a life of simplicity, close to the land and to God. His story is hardly as sensational and dramatic as Anna's, and yet without the mystery of seeing Levin's life juxtaposed with hers — they actually have a connection in the book, not hinted at here — the story loses some of its perspective and its flavour. Gleeson does well in this demanding role, reduced though it is.

As Vronsky, Aaron Taylor-Johnson certainly brings conceit and a callow self-regard. He preens well. As in his earlier movies Kick-Ass and Nowhere Boy , he is an attractive, open presence, but he is out of his depth here, especially when he has to suggest Vronsky's later agony and wretchedness, and the fact that he, as well as Anna, has made sacrifices for their affair.

And so the tale continues, interestingly, if somewhat disconcertingly, in this semi-permeable fantasy theatre, from which the characters make their periodic excursions into the outside world. It is probably most startling when the racecourse scene is actually held indoors, in the theatre. The horses parade round and round the auditorium itself. That's certainly striking, though audiences of a more down-to-earth cast of mind could be forgiven for wondering what the smell would be like, and where the guys with shovels are standing.

More successful, and more moving, is a tableau later in the film which shows the gentle meadow where Karenin comes to terms with his memories, or perhaps it is rather the meadow where Anna had her most ecstatic intimacy with Vronsky. Surreally, miraculously, this meadow is spread over the theatre; the building is carpeted with flowers. A dream of freedom and contentment has spread itself out in a place which until then had been a venue for anxiety and unhappiness. The Wright/Stoppard Anna Karenina is not a total success, but it's a bold and creative response to the novel.

• Period and historical films
• Drama films
• Keira Knightley
• Tom Stoppard
• Leo Tolstoy

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The Joffrey Ballet’s Anna Karenina: a brilliant and fresh reimagination of a beloved classic

Yoshihisa arai and anais bueno in anna karenina. photography credit cheryl mann, courtesy of the joffrey ballet..

Yesterday marked the opening of the Joffrey Ballet’s world premiere of “Anna Karenina”, choreographed by Russian ballet choreographer, Yuri Possokhov, and co-produced by The Australian Ballet. As the lights dim in the Auditorium Theatre—located on the newly-named E. Ida B. Wells Drive—The Mary B. Galvin Artistic Director, Ashley Wheater, and Joffrey President and CEO, Greg Cameron appear from the wings. Cameron welcomes the audience to the performance and speaks to the magnitude of the evening’s ballet. As a world premiere, and the Joffrey’s first full-length story ballet accompanied by an original score, “Anna Karenina,” comes to Chicago as a gift. “Chicago is no longer a second city!” Cameron exclaims as the audience bursts into applause. In all of the ways that Chicago is understood by those who live outside the city, and those who live within its limits, but in very different contexts, what does is mean for the Joffrey to take on “Anna Karenina”—a classical romantic novel by Leo Tolstoy that tells the story of a woman caught between her heart and the societal standards of the Russian aristocracy—and reimagine it for Chicago and her dance audiences? With a brilliant new musical composition by acclaimed, Russian composer, Ilya Demutsky, and stunning set and costume design by Tony-award winning designer, Tom Pye, Joffrey’s “Anna Karenina” is fresh and modern, communicating a story that exists between the lines of social class, love and tragedy. 

Joffrey’s Victoria Jaiani dances the lead role of Anna Karenina, alongside fellow Joffrey company member, Alberto Velazquez, who dances the role of her lover, Alexey Vronsky. As individuals, the dancers exhibit a vivacity and intricacy in their expressions, jumps and footwork that is stunning and passionate. They each bring these characters to life, and breathe their own narratives in Possokhov’s playful choreography. 

As a result of years of dreaming and conversations between Wheater and Possokhov, “Anna Karenina” is a gorgeous work and huge accomplishment for the Joffrey Ballet. Possokhov’s playful and inventive choreography, along with the vivid projections, light and set design completely absorbs the audience into the ballrooms, countryside, and back rooms of 19thcentury Russian Parliament. In a city that is often referred to as a second city, The Joffrey Ballet’s “Anna Karenina”—the story of a woman who dared to try love and cross the lines of aristocracy, wealth and power for the one she loved—is a special addition to the cultural heart of Chicago.

"Anna Karenina" runs through Feb. 24 at the Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Ida B. Wells Drive. Tickets start at $35, with Hot Deals available through See Chicago Dance. For more information, click the links below or visit joffrey.org

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Anna Karenina

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Is “Anna Karenina” a Love Story?

By Joshua Rothman

The fourth post in a series in which we ask what book or writer our contributors have returned to again and again.

A few weeks ago, on an appropriately snowy Wednesday, my wife and I went to see the new film version of “Anna Karenina.” It was the movie’s New York première, and, before it started, Joe Wright, the director, a dark-haired Englishman in a gray suit, stood up to say a few words. He introduced Keira Knightley, who plays Anna, along with the actors who play Kitty and Levin, Alicia Vikander and Domhnall Gleeson. Wright spoke earnestly, like a proud older brother, of having worked with Knightley since “Pride and Prejudice,” when she was only “an ingenue.” Meanwhile, he said, his new movie, “Anna Karenina,” was about love, and about all the ways in which love makes us human. Wright and his actors slipped out a side door, and the movie began.

Wright’s “Anna Karenina” isn’t a straight-forward adaptation of the novel, but a fanciful, expressionistic reinterpretation of it, with a knowing, self-conscious screenplay by Tom Stoppard. The sets are inventive and metafictional. Knightley plays Anna with an edgy sensuality; Vronsky’s steeplechase is vivid and terrifying; the Levin and Kitty story is sweet, patient, and even spiritual. Still—if you know and love the novel, something about the movie just doesn’t feel right. The problem, I think, is that it’s too romantic. The film, as Wright promised, is all about love, but Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” isn’t a love story. If anything, “Anna Karenina” is a warning against the myth and cult of love.

When I first started reading “Anna Karenina,” ten years ago—I’m obsessed with the book, and have read it seven times since then—I, too, thought of it as a love story. I was twenty-three, and thinking of getting married; to me, it was obvious that the novel was about love, good and bad, wise and unwise. I read the novel as you might read any novel about marriage and adultery. You think about the protagonists and their choices; you root for happy endings. When they come, you applaud, and feel they’re well-deserved; when they don’t, you try to figure out what the lovers did wrong. But this love-story idea of love isn’t really native to “Anna Karenina.” Tolstoy, when he wrote the novel, was thinking about love in a different way: as a kind of fate, or curse, or judgment, and as a vector by which the universe distributes happiness and unhappiness, unfairly and apparently at random.

Those thoughts aren’t very romantic, but they are Tolstoyan. When he turned to “Anna Karenina,” Tolstoy didn’t simply leave behind the themes of “War and Peace.” Instead, he found a way of thinking about many of same issues that had always interested him—fate, chance, our powerlessness against circumstances and our determination to change them—in a different context. In 1873, when Tolstoy began writing “Anna Karenina,” he was in the midst of planning a historical novel about Peter the Great. Starting in 1870, he had shut himself up in his study at Yasnaya Polyana, reading and making notes, while his wife and their enormous brood of children tried to keep quiet outside. Peter the Great turned out to be too epic a subject even for Tolstoy. (“I am in a very bad mood,” he wrote to a friend. “Making no headway. The project I have chosen is incredibly difficult. There is no end to the preliminary research, the outline is swelling out of all proportion and I feel my strength ebbing away.”) Tolstoy needed a more manageable subject. Then he discovered something: another way into his concerns that wasn’t overblown and historical, but personal, intimate, and sad. In his biography of Tolstoy, Henri Troyat explains the novel’s origins this way:

Suddenly he had an illumination. He remembered an occurrence that had deeply affected him the previous year. A neighbor and friend of his, Bibikov, the snipe hunter, lived with a woman named Anna Stepanovna Pirogova, a tall, full-blown woman with a broad face and an easy-going nature, who had become his mistress. But he had been neglecting her of late for his children’s German governess. He had even made up his mind to marry the blond Frÿulein. Learning of his treachery, Anna Stepanovna’s jealousy burst all bounds; she ran away, carrying a bundle of clothes, and wandered about the countryside for three days, crazed with grief. Then she threw herself under a freight train at the Yasenki station. Before she died, she sent a note to Bibikov: “You are my murderer. Be happy, if an assassin can be happy. If you like you can see my corpse on the rails at Yasenki.” That was January 4, 1872. The following day Tolstoy had gone to the station as a spectator, while the autopsy was being performed in the presence of a police inspector. Standing in a corner of the shed, he had observed every detail of the woman’s body lying on the table, bloody and mutilated, with its skull crushed. How shameless, he thought, and yet how chaste. A dreadful lesson was brought home to him by that white, naked flesh, those dead breasts, those inert thighs that had felt and given pleasure. He tried to imagine the existence of this poor woman who had given all for love, only to meet with such a trite, ugly death.

I suppose that there’s a love story here, but what really interested Tolstoy wasn’t love, per se, but its extreme consequences. As Tolstoy began writing “Anna Karenina,” he introduced other characters and other stories, including the love story of Kitty and Levin. But at its core—without the balm of Kitty and Levin’s romance—“Anna Karenina” remains troubled by what happened to Anna Stepanovna. This makes it different from other love stories—in them, love is a positive good. If you have it, you’re glad, and if you don’t have it, you’re not. (Think of Lizzie Bennett and Charlotte Lucas, in “Pride and Prejudice.”) In “Anna Karenina,” love can be a curse as well as a blessing. It’s an elemental force in human affairs, like genius, or anger, or strength, or wealth. Sometimes it’s good, but sometimes it's awful, cruel, even dangerous. It’s wonderful that Levin and Kitty fall in love with one another—but Anna would have been better off if she had never fallen in love with Vronsky.

This view of love sounds fine, in theory, but in practice it can be hard to accept, because it runs against the mythology of love, which sees star-crossed lovers as more romantic, more in love, than the rest of us. That mythology urges us to see Anna’s death as a noble sacrifice: She gave up everything, we want to say, for a chance at love. It’s a seductive, but crazy, way to think. The fact of the matter is that nothing good came of the romance between Anna and Vronsky, and everyone would have been better off if it had never happened. Their affair was a cataclysm for Anna, obviously, but also for Vronsky, for Karenin, and for Seryozha, their son. In teaching the novel, I’ve seen students try to wriggle out of this conclusion; most of them do it by posing counterfactuals. Some argue that Anna didn’t have to commit suicide; the suicide was the mistake, the thinking goes, not the love affair. And you can also question the inevitability of Anna’s circumstances. Anna spirals into suicide, you might argue, for many historically contingent reasons: laws that are biased against women, religious prohibitions against divorce, a system of courtship that pushes girls to marry too young, and so on. It turned out badly, you might argue, but that wasn’t Anna’s fault—if things had been different, she and Vronsky could have been happy. And yet the point is that things weren’t different for Anna. The laws were unfair, but they were still laws. As my Jewish grandmother says: “What is, is.” “Anna Karenina” is preceded by an unsettling, unattributed epigraph quote: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” That’s the sentiment, to some extent, behind Anna’s suicide. But it’s also, from Tolstoy’s point of view, a statement of fact about the universe. It doesn’t budge. What is, is.

If Anna isn’t the novel’s heroine—if she isn’t a martyr to Love—then what is she? Deciding what to think of Anna is one of the central challenges of “Anna Karenina.” Some readers, perhaps because they feel betrayed by Anna, end up questioning her character, or her judgment, or her motives. Unable to see her as good, they end up seeing her as bad. Keira Knightley, in an interview taped at the New York première, seems to feel this way: “As far as the story of ‘Anna Karenina,’” she says, “most people, in most adaptations—and I haven’t seen all of them—have taken Anna to be the heroine, and to be the innocent, a sort of saintly creature who is wronged, by the world, by her husband, by society, by everything. I didn’t necessarily think that when I read the book, the last time. I think you could also say that about Anna. But I think she is also the anti-hero.” Knightley ends up playing Anna as just a little wicked. (Some people will feel that there is too much lust, and not enough love, in her relationship with Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Vronsky.) Ultimately, though, “anti-hero” might be too strong a term for Anna. Tolstoy, as the critic Gary Saul Morson has argued, is sensitive to the fact that much of the evil in the world results not from malice, but from ignorance. Anna does bad things, but often only because she underestimates just how bad the consequences of those things will be. Anna doesn’t plan to fall in love with Vronsky, as such—she's not a cougar on the prowl—and one of the reasons for her later unhappiness is that, in sleeping with him, she has disappointed herself. In the novel’s (and the film’s) first episode, Anna travels to Moscow to act as a peacemaker between her brother Stiva and his wife Dolly, on whom he has cheated. Leaving, she can’t wait to get back to her family in St. Petersburg: “Thank God,” she thinks, “tomorrow I’ll see Seryozha and Alexei Alexandrovich, and my good and usual life will go on as before.”

Anna, Tolstoy suggests, is like the watchman who, at the beginning of the novel, gets run down by a train: “either drunk or too bundled up because of the freezing cold,” he doesn’t hear the train coming. Her affair with Vronsky is less like a love story, and more like a tragedy, ruled by fate. And Tolstoy is careful to show that the same is true, in an obverse way, for Levin and Kitty, who are simply lucky where Anna is unlucky. Levin, it turns out, had been in love with Kitty’s two older sisters; as things worked out, they happened to get married to other men (one of them, Dolly, to Stiva). Had things been different, Kitty might have ended up married to Stiva, not Levin, and Levin to Dolly. At one point, it appears that Levin is about to give up on Kitty completely; but, at just that moment, Kitty’s carriage happens to pass by the field where Levin is walking, deep in the countryside. And, of course, there’s the fact that Levin and Kitty might not be together at all were it not for Anna, who steals Vronsky from Kitty at a ball in the novel’s early pages. Almost as a provocation, Tolstoy places this fact—that Anna’s adultery paves the way for Levin and Kitty’s happy marriage—at the center of his novel, where it sits, a mute and ironic reminder of how much our own successes can depend on others’ disasters.

Tolstoy, I think, doesn’t know exactly how to think about Anna’s role in her own downfall, just as he doesn’t know exactly how to think about the free will of the soldiers and generals in “War and Peace.” He believes that we make choices, and that our sense of free will is based on something real. But he also has a deep respect for the complexity and power of our circumstances, and he considers our personalities and psychologies to be “circumstances,” too. There are limits to what we can do out there in the world, and there are also limits to what we can feel, endure, know, and imagine within ourselves. These inner limits may be just as permanent as the outer ones. In Anna’s case, she may have been hemmed in on all sides: driven, in her soul, to love Vronsky, while living in a world that made acting on that love unwise and unendurable. Or, she may have made an unwise choice, giving into desires she could have resisted because she underestimated how unyielding the world would be. We will never know what happened, exactly, just as Anna could not know. That’s one of the dreadful lessons of Anna’s story: she herself could not distinguish between what she was choosing to do and what she was driven to do. In life, we sometimes relinquish our freedom too easily, while, at other times, we struggle unwisely against laws that will not change. Give in too easily, and you drift through life; struggle too much, and you suffer for it.

After Anna dies, much of the end of the novel is devoted to Levin, who struggles to come to terms with the very small role he has played in his own happiness. Levin is likable, thoughtful, and sincere, but he is not particularly wise, experienced, or brilliant. (Tolstoy’s wife, Sonia, told Tolstoy that Levin was “you, without the talent.”) He is like Anna, in that he spends much of the novel debating, in a more overt and deliberate way, the same questions that Anna faces. Should he try to force the people and institutions around him to change, so that he can live in accordance with the dictates of his soul (for example, by remaking his farm along “modern” lines, politically and agriculturally)? Or should he submit to one of the pre-determined possibilities his world offers him and become a completely conventional gentleman farmer? Because he’s a rich, independent man, the stakes for him are lower than they are for Anna, but they’re still substantive: Levin feels that none of the usual ways of life will be meaningful for him, and he doesn’t want his life to be meaningless.

The thing about Levin is that, through some accident of temperament and circumstances, he ends up figuring things out. He struggles and shapes his own destiny just enough to be happy, while never going out of bounds, and ending up like Anna, or like his brother Nikolai, a political radical, who dies impoverished and angry. Somehow, over the course of the book, Levin achieves everything he wants: he is married to Kitty, and they have a beautiful family. And yet, he senses, he has not really improved himself in his soul, and he has done nothing to deserve his happiness. He still feels powerless, pointless, useless. “Happy in his family life,” Tolstoy writes, “a healthy man, Levin was several times so close to suicide that he hid a rope lest he hang himself with it, and was afraid to go about with a rifle lest he shoot himself.” In the end, he is carried along by the flow of life, and keeps on living. He finds his way to a diffuse kind of faith. There will be no radical transformations, he realizes, either romantic or religious. What is, is. He will try his best to be a good person, within the constraints that his circumstances and nature have placed upon him, and that will be good enough:

I’ll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I’ll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I’ll fail in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray—but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!

The novel leaves us with an answer that is also a riddle. Why was Levin able to find this peace, while Anna was not? Levin’s realization itself suggests that there’s no answer to that question. In “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Isaiah Berlin writes that, for Tolstoy, wisdom consists in the ability “to grasp what human will and human reason can do, and what they cannot.” The only way to find those limits is to struggle against them, but gently, with the goal of finding and accepting them. You can’t think your way to the limits. You have to feel your way, learning through experience and suffering. And there is a risk in experimenting with what will and will not work in life, which is that it might not work. You might move to New York to pursue your dreams, and end up with no career to speak of. You might think you can wait to find the perfect spouse, but wait too long, and end up alone. You might think you can have that affair and still have the love of your spouse and children—but you may be mistaken about what’s possible, and lose everything.

There’s a deep conservatism to this way of thinking. It’s fatalistic, in an off-putting way, since it suggests that the limits of what’s possible are just not knowable in advance, and that experience and tradition are probably our best guides. In Anna’s case, it suggests that she should have tried harder to accept her unhappy marriage with Karenin. If she did try, and found herself hemmed in by limits on all sides, then there’s no making sense, in human terms, of her suffering. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay” is from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans; it’s in the middle of a beautiful passage about the difficulties of accepting injustices and differences. “We have many members in one body,” Paul says, “and all members have not the same office.”

Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, whether prophecy, let us prophesy according to the proportion of faith; or ministry, let us wait on our ministering: or he that teacheth, on teaching; or he that exhorteth, on exhortation: he that giveth, let him do it with simplicity; he that ruleth, with diligence; he that sheweth mercy, with cheerfulness. Let love be without dissimulation. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good…Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.

To read “Anna Karenina” is to care about Anna. She is one of the best characters in fiction; everyone in “Anna Karenina” loves her, and so do we. Reading about her struggle, it’s natural to want to understand it. Should Anna be applauded for her passion, or condemned for her foolhardiness? Is she to be admired, or spurned? Wright and Stoppard know that “Anna Karenina” urges you to push those questions aside. In its final minutes, their film asks you to contemplate the injustice and unknowability of it all. Watching Levin and Kitty with their baby in the film’s closing minutes, you feel how blessed they are. Vikander and Gleeson share a silent, reverent look, and in it you see their consciousness of their own undeserved happiness—of God’s grace. Even so, the movie can never quite escape its love-story roots. Its characters are too typed—wicked Anna, pure Kitty—and it doesn’t show us enough of their ordinary, unromantic lives for us to understand how similar they are to one another. Wright’s film only shows its characters falling in love. Tolstoy’s novel can take its time, showing how these characters struggle and hesitate, think and watch, imagine and debate, suffer and forgive. It can rise above the very human questions of admiration and condemnation, above the might-have-beens and should-have-dones, and simply say: this is the way things are. Be thankful for your happiness.

Illustration by Andy Rementer.

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The New York Times

Carpetbagger | below the line: the design of ‘anna karenina’.

Below the Line: The Design of ‘Anna Karenina’

In his film adaptation of “Anna Karenina,” the director Joe Wright tried to capture the emotional journeys of its characters while conveying the epic scope of their surroundings. But instead of an elaborate (and budget unfriendly) shoot in the Russian locations where the story takes place, he opted to set the movie in a derelict theater, to give the feel of decaying 19th-century Russian society.

Below the Line

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“The nice thing is, because we have worked together so long, it does become like second nature,” Ms. Spencer said. “We have an understanding and both have similar visual tastes.”

They both also got their initial training in theater, so Mr. Wright’s concept for this adaptation suited them. The theater where the bulk of the film’s action takes place was built in 12 weeks on a soundstage at Shepperton Studios, outside London. Here is a look at some of the designs and sets from “Anna Karenina,” with commentary by Ms. Greenwood and Ms. Spencer.

Drawing the Drawing Room

Ms. Greenwood visited Russia with Mr. Wright and looked at architecture, as well as conducted extensive research on designs of the period. Because the production was taking liberties with interpretation, from the theatrical concept to some of its off-period costume choices , Ms. Greenwood wanted to stick with a traditional 19th-century look in  the settings. She worked closely with the illustrator Eva Kuntz to create the concept art, like this shot  of a scene in which the character Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) goes to see Kitty (Alicia Vikander) in her drawing room and propose to her .

“In this image, the back wall was in fact the wallpaper we saw on our trip to Russia in a room in the summer palace of Catherine the Great,” Ms. Greenwood said.  “When we got back to the U.K. and looked at each other’s pictures, it was a photograph that we’d all taken.” Clouds and other heavenly elements were added to the design and this  is how the set appears in the film:

The Railway Station

The story involves a number of train journeys between Moscow and St. Petersburg. Given the  theatrical setting, the designers wondered how they would create a sequence with trains inside the theater.

Karenin’s Bedroom

This set was built in a separate studio. With its marble floors and tall ceilings, it was meant to reveal elements of Karenin’s character. “When you look at it longways, it’s like mini proscenium arches,” Ms. Spencer said. “The idea behind the Karenin house was that it was very different from how Anna’s brother lives. Everything is very austere and masculine.

“There was a bed plot running through the film where the Karenin bed is very unwelcoming and unrelenting. So when Anna goes to Vronksy’s bedroom and when they get together, it’s much more sensual and welcoming.”

What's Next

‘Anna Karenina’ review: Joe Wright’s artifice overshadows actors

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“Anna Karenina,” director Joe Wright’s startling new vision of the Tolstoy classic, is all dressed up with no place to go. Starring Keira Knightley, Jude Law and Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the tale of passion and impropriety in Imperial Russian society, circa 1870, the production is bold, sumptuous, ambitious and yet bound by its own self-imposed conventions.

In a rash move, Wright has confined most of the sweeping story to a single decaying theater. Literally all of Anna Karenina’s world is that stage, its action unfolding in odd nooks and crannies of the ancient structure, much of it on catwalks and along backstage corridors. Prop rooms become drawing rooms, the auditorium subs for a ballroom, an ice rink, a horse track. You might think that playwright Tom Stoppard, who adapted the novel, had a hand in the staging, but this was Wright’s illusion — both a brilliant and a baffling one.

The idea of putting polite society on a stage is a clever starting point. Even as Leo Tolstoy first imagined it, everyone in Moscow and St. Petersburg’s top drawer, where the story takes place, is careful in playing their roles. Until, that is, Anna (Knightley) breaks form and falls passionately and fairly publicly in love with the dashing young Count Vronsky (Taylor-Johnson). Anna’s indiscretion is so out of character that Anna’s husband Karenin (Law), a proper government official, meets the idea of her promiscuity with disbelief that slowly dissolves, like a bitter pill, into distaste. Law is outstanding in his restraint and his receding hairline.

INTERACTIVE: Tricks to turning pages into frames

Stoppard has stripped Tolstoy’s sprawling fiction down to focus solely on matters of the heart, that well-known maze of misplaced affections. It begins with an indiscreet dalliance by Anna’s brother Oblonsky, Matthew Macfadyen exceptional as that lovable cad. It has put his marriage to perpetually pregnant Dolly (Kelly Macdonald) at risk, and Anna’s been enlisted to travel from her St. Petersburg home to Moscow to help him patch things up. At the same time, a young landowner named Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) has traveled to the city to propose to Dolly’s younger sister Kitty (Alicia Vikander), who’s become infatuated with the charming Vronsky. Everything changes when Vronsky first spies Anna disembarking the train — a chance encounter that sparks the flirtation, obsession and destruction that will follow.

When the film opens with a curtain rising on an elegant night at the theater, it seems like a lovely invitation to the party. But at some point it begins to register that something very unusual is afoot. Backdrops provide the clouds and star-filled skies; ballroom dances are choreographed so specifically that even the slightest brush of fingertips against shoulders is completely in concert. The harvest at Levin’s farm is poetic, a haiku of scythes cutting through the wheat, their arcs an alliteration.

It is impossible not to be captivated by the visual artistry that infuses the film. The production design by Sarah Greenwood, set design by Katie Spencer, choreography by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and costumes by Jacqueline Durran are so superlative that they emerge as characters in their own right. Layers of subtext exist with the folds of a gown, every prop in hand. That Karenin’s world of papers and bureaucracy is filled with timepieces down to the pocket watch he is so often checking is but one of many considered choices.

That is saying a lot because beginning with Knightley, this cast puts hearts and anguish on the line in trying to bring an emotional reality to the artificial world Wright has dropped them into. Knightley, in particular, uses her passion and her pain to try to punch through the walls that have been constructed around her. The pleasure she finds in Vronsky is just as unbridled. Best is the way Knightley embodies Anna’s insistence that she be free to feel whatever is in her heart. But you always sense the edges, and the limits, that Wright’s theater of the absurd imposes.

The director’s interpretation has a feeling of something to be studied, appreciated, but it makes for a movie that is difficult to enjoy. Rather than being swept up in all the intrigues, you can never forget that this is a “work” of art, or the labor involved in every single scene.

In the end “Anna Karenina” lets you down — visually stunning, emotionally overwrought, beautifully acted, but not quite right.

MPAA rating: R for some sexuality and violence

Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes

Playing: At ArcLight Hollywood

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Anna Karenina

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Rent Anna Karenina on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

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Joe Wright's energetic adaptation of Tolstoy's classic romance is a bold, visually stylized work -- for both better and worse.

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Keira Knightley

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Domhnall Gleeson

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Film Review: ANNA KARENINA (directed by Joe Wright)

by Kevin Bowen on November 21, 2012

WEIGHED DOWN BY GLITTERING JEWELS

Over-conceived and under-emoted, Joe Wright’s experimental Anna Karenina is art-directed to within both an inch of brilliance and an inch of death. This version of the Tolstoy novel indulges the British in three of their favorite pastimes: Stage, adapting novels, and pretending they’re Russian without actually performing Russian accents (how is it that the British loudly complain when an American misses their accent by a smidge, but they never, ever, ever even try to do a Russian one?) This Anna Karenina is taken from a novel which is turned into a play which is then turned into a movie. It’s not a normal play.  It’s a lite-brite surreal spectacular—water colored, handcrafted, and mindful of being a fiction. It’s like My Fair Lady after falling asleep in the poppy field of The Wizard of Oz.

This is the sort of movie that’s hard on critics, because they spend so much time bellyaching about never seeing anything new. What do you do with a film that’s inventive but not clicking? Should you try to give the tie to the runner? But what if it just doesn’t work? What if, even worse, it only works in parts?

What’s not working here? Take the grand ball scene in Anna Karenina and compare it to the dance from Wright’s Pride and Prejudice that it mirrors. The dance in Anna Karenina has more cinematic flair, brilliantly emotive lighting, an overwhelming set design, lavish choreography, and prettier dresses. But it’s being whipped along entirely by music and technique, and not by emotion. It’s lacking heat, passion, and the joy of feeling love in one moment, qualities the simpler scene in Pride has in spades.

In a nutshell, this is the problematic arc of Wright’s career. Pride showed a beautiful connection between young love and expressive vision of the English countryside. That balance also remained through the first half of Atonement , but its second half showed the first steps toward over-design and cinematic showboating. The Soloist was a disaster, but Hanna looked like an inventive rebound. Now Karenina is back to excess. This has been the pattern for Wright—his films have gotten more grandiose while losing their romantic intimacy.

This tension is embedded in the performance of Aaron-Taylor Johnson ( Savages ) as the dandy Colonel Vronsky, whose performance could best be described as ornamental. In Pride and Prejudice , Matthew Macfadyen got the brooding romantic figure of Darcy, but here, Taylor-Johnson gives a theatrical performance, watered down in pose, isolated from the acting around him. That might be the idea—to highlight Vronsky’s shallowness—but it comes across as pantomime. He does rub off on Keira Knightley, who seems only slightly drowned by the decor.

It doesn’t help that the story asks a lot of its audience in offering sympathy to Anna. Just because you live in an oppressive social system doesn’t mean you’re not a narcissist. Her suicidal ending stacks the deck against her alleged oppressors. In real life, Anna wouldn’t throw herself in front of a train. She would just go on making the same mistakes with the same disregard for other people and screaming “oppression” when they didn’t like it. In a New York Times article, Wright disparages the usual take that “Anna is martyred, the victim of a patriarchal society.” But in the ending to Wright’s film, I don’t see the difference.

photos by Laurie Sparham

Anna Karenina Universal Pictures, Focus Features, Working Title Films rated PG-13 in wide release November 21, 2012

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Anna Karenina review — Tolstoy squeezed too far

Challenge yourself with today’s puzzles.

★★☆☆☆ Whittling down Leo Tolstoy’s epic love story to two and a half hours for a cast of eight sounds like a tall order. What to do with all those subplots and supporting players, the decadent ball sequences, the haymaking scenes that go on for days?

Lesley Hart’s adaptation for the Lyceum and Bristol Old Vic tries to have its cake and eat it, skating across the vast surface of Tolstoy’s novel, stripping out extraneous digression while remaining loyal to the set pieces. There are some stirring moments in Polina Kalinina’s production, but little in the way of nuance or psychological depth.

One of the problems is Hart’s use of an everyday contemporary register, with characters speaking their minds bluntly and profanely. Hearing Dolly (Jamie

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, leo tolstoy's anna karenina.

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It's not the story but the style and the ideas that make Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina'' a great novel and not a soap opera. There's no shortage of stories about bored rich women who leave their older husbands and take up with playboys. This new screen version of the novel makes that clear by focusing on the story, which without Tolstoy's wisdom, is a grim and melodramatic affair. Here is a woman of intoxicating beauty and deep passion, and she becomes so morose and tiresome that by the end, we'd just as soon she throw herself under a train, and are not much cheered when she obliges.

The film has been shot on location in Russia; we see St. Petersburg exteriors, country estates and opulent Czarist palaces whose corridors recede to infinity. It all looks wonderful, but the characters, with one exception, are clunks who seem awed to be in the screen adaptation of a Russian classic. The exception is Alexei Karenin, Anna's husband, who is played by James Fox with such a weary bitterness that I found myself caring for him even when he was being cruel to poor Anna.

The story: Anna ( Sophie Marceau ) and her husband live on a country estate, where their marriage is a dry affair. She goes to the city to counsel her rakish brother Stiva ( Danny Huston ), who is treating his wife badly. She meets a slickster named Count Vronsky ( Sean Bean ), who has a mistress named Kitty ( Mia Kirshner ), but he drops her the moment he sees Anna. He dances with her, she is intoxicated by his boldness, she leaves by train, and he stops the train in the middle of the night to say he must have her, etc. It is not a good sign that while he declares his love, we are more concerned about how his horses could have possibly overtaken the train.

Back in the country, Vronsky pursues his ideal, and Anna succumbs, after a tiny little struggle. Karenin observes what is happening, especially during a steeplechase when Vronsky's horse falls and Anna shrieks with concern that appears unseemly in another man's wife. Soon Anna is pregnant by Vronsky. Karenin, after trying to force himself on her, offers her a deal: If she stays with him and behaves herself, she can keep the child. Otherwise, she gets Vronsky, but not the child.

As in all late 19th century novels, this crisis leads to a sickbed scene, declarations of redemption and forgiveness, etc., while meanwhile in the city, a parallel romance develops between the jilted Kitty and the kind but uncharismatic Levin ( Alfred Molina ). In the novel, Levin stands for Tolstoy, and also for the decency that the other characters lack.

The challenge of any adapter of "Anna Karenina'' is to make Anna sympathetic despite her misbehavior. Sometimes that is done with casting (how could we deny Garbo anything?), sometimes with writing. In this film, it is not done. I never felt sympathy for her, perhaps because Sophie Marceau (from "Braveheart") makes her such a narcissistic sponge, while Fox makes her husband tortured but understandable. Toward the end, as Anna and Vronsky are shunned by society and live in isolation, she even gets on his nerves, especially after she becomes addicted to laudanum.

There is much more to Tolstoy's story--but not in this bloodless and shallow adaptation. Bernard Rose is a director of talent (his " Paperhouse " was a visionary film, and his " Immortal Beloved " was a biopic that brought great passion to the story of Beethoven). Here, shooting on fabulous locations, he seems to have lost track of his characters. The movie is like a storyboard for "Anna Karenina'' with the life and subtlety still to be added.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Anna Karenina (1997)

Rated PG-13 For Mature Thematic Elements and Some Sensuality/Nudity

108 minutes

Sophie Marceau as Anna Karenina

Sean Bean as Count Vronsky

Alfred Molina as Constantin Levin

James Fox as Alexei Karenin

Written and Directed by

• Bernard Rose

Based On The Novel by

• Leo Tolstoy

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Anna Karenina: The taming of Tolstoy’s masterpiece

This article was published more than 11 years ago. Some information may no longer be current.

Keira Knightley in Anna Karenina.

As multifaceted as its creator, Anna Karenina is a great holy mess of a book. It's a brilliant psychological novel; it's a sweeping social exploration; it's a philosophic treatise on moral relativism and the limits of reason. But it's also rambling and repetitive and raw, although that structural weakness doubles as an overarching strength – the book, like Leo Tolstoy himself, pulses with an untameable energy.

In this adaptation, director Joe Wright, plus screenwriter Tom Stoppard, are determined to tame the untameable. And they do. The pair put the novel into the vise grip of a theatrical paradigm, then they squeeze hard. The compressed result is intelligent, artful, clarifying and very thin – the picture's structural strength doubles as an underlying weakness. In other words, the movie enjoys what the novel lacks and lacks what the novel enjoys.

The opening sequence is, quite literally, staged. Imperial Russia, circa 1874, exists as (and in) a decaying theatre, with the camera gliding through the proscenium arch and into the wings and up to the flies, until the silence is broken by this curt aside: "Sin has a price. You may be sure of that." Immediately, then, we are sure of two things. First, the social sweep of the novel has been reduced to a single presiding metaphor: Old Russia is a stage show, a claustrophobic and closed society of prescribed, rigid roles. Second, as evident in that sinful aside, the psychology and the philosophy are similarly whisked away. Befitting a theatrical interpretation, what's left is pure melodrama – in this case, the melodrama of love in all its destructive, expansive, narcissistic, selfless guises.

Of course, amidst this amorous tangle, a classic triangle soon arises linking the adulterous Anna (Keira Knightley), her husband Karenin (Jude Law) and Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), the natty object of her unbridled passion. The developing geometry gets dramatized in a series of beautifully choreographed sequences. Staying within the stage conceit, Wright captures Karenin at work, the cold-fish bureaucrat with his subordinates dancing attention. Then in the formal dance at an elaborate ball, the sparks first ignite between the black-gowned Anna and her circling white knight, their waltz escalating from a courtly ritual into a breathless frenzy. Appropriately, the affair's consummation breaks through the stage wall to the outside world, outside the societal rules in a lush field where the grass sways in a hot wind and the lovers embrace for a torrid French kiss. Also appropriate – well-born Russians of the time were all ardent Francophiles.

Visually, this is fascinating, a fresh and counterintuitive take on the old problem of adapting a classic book – don't open it up so much as close it down. Consequently, the plot's love triangle has a neat counterpart in the picture's stylistic triangle – a blend of the theatrical, the cinematic and (in several freeze frames) the painterly that weaves through the entire piece. A toy train becomes a real train that becomes a prop train. The fluttering of a lady's fan becomes the thundering of horse's hooves, whereupon actual steeds circle within a fake paddock. Yes, like that waltz and that train, love can be staged or it can be raw, a ritualized business or a runaway emotion.

Unusual too is the sympathy allotted to the principal trio. Played by Law wih a balding pate and muted hauteur, Karenin receives more than the customary share. When he laments, "Tell me what I did to deserve this?" the question seems rhetorical and the answer clear: "Nothing, you poor cuckold, nothing." Conversely, Anna appears shallow, slight, egocentric and hypocritically eager to snub society's dictates without sacrificing its benefits, characteristics that rob her of a tragic dimension but, more happily, that fall easily within Knightley's acting range. As for Vronsky, young and blond and curly-haired, he's just a pretty-boy victim here – first of his own desires and then of Anna's.

No doubt, there's clarity in the melodrama, yet at the expense of complexity. And, like the stage metaphor itself, the clarity begins to grow a bit precious, even before that train steams in for the bloody climax. Only once does the script choose to broaden instead of narrow. Compared to other adaptations, it gives more attention to Tolstoy's alter-ego Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) and his ultimately perfect marriage with Mother Russia (Alicia Vikander). Alas, his larger role is largely a mistake. Even in the novel, Levin is a problematic figure, but there he at least has to struggle to earn his idealized status. Here, he's just idealized and thus a clumsy symbol, perpetually surrounded by nature but so damned artificial.

Wright has always been a director with a passion for the grand idea – remember that surreal tracking shot across the Dunkirk beach in Atonement , war as a continuing carnival of horror? His passion is admirable but, like so many in the melodrama of love, it brings rewards and inflicts punishments alike. There's plenty of both in this Anna Karenina and, in that sense, the film stands in a unique position to the novel – an intriguing adaptation, yes, but an even better object lesson.

SIX MEMORABLE TOLSTOY ADAPTATIONS

The author of the towering 19th-century novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina lived long enough to see the early years of cinema with apparent approval. You can watch an elderly, white-bearded Leo Tolstoy on YouTube, handing alms to the poor like a Russian Santa Claus, There's also footage of him on his deathbed at the Astapovo railway station in 1910, a scene dramatized in the 2009 film The Last Station, starring Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren.

According to one purported interview (not published until 1937 in The New York Times), Tolstoy saw great possibilities in film and even had a project in mind for the screen. "The cinema," he is quoted as saying, "has divined the mystery of motion. And that is greatness."

That greatness hasn't often found its way into adaptations of Tolstoy's work, though it's not for lack of trying. Of the scores of Tolstoy film and television adaptations over the past century, here are a half-dozen of the most famous attempts to divine the mystery of Tolstoy's art.

Anna Karenina (1935) Directed by Clarence Brown

Running a brisk 96-minutes, this sumptuous MGM film starred Greta Garbo as Anna, with Basil Rathbone as her husband, and Frederic March as Vronsky. Though it chopped out a lot of Tolstoy, the film has remained well-regarded as a vehicle for its luminous star.

Anna Karenina (1948) Directed by Julien Duvivier

This British-made, Alexander Korda-produced version starred Vivien Leigh (post-Scarlett O'Hara, pre-Blanche DuBois) with Ralph Richardson as Karenin and newcomer Kieron Moore as Vronsky, with a screenplay partly written by French dramatist Jean Anouilh. The film flopped, though the gorgeous sets by Russian art director André Andrejew and costumes by Cecil Beaton are still admired.

War and Peace (1956) Directed by King Vidor

The first English-language version of Tolstoy's massive novel was an American-Italian production that focused on three characters: Pierre (Henry Fonda), Natasha (Audrey Hepburn) and Prince Andrei (Mel Ferrer). Though it ran three hours and 26 minutes and the battle scenes were impressive, the film was dismissed as sketchy and miscast. The New York Times's Bosley Crowther noted its "oddly mechanical and emotionally sterile air."

War and Peace (1967) Directed by Sergei Bondarchuk

With the Cold War still on deep chill and the United States taking the lead in the space race, the Soviet Union served up a cinematic counterstrike: This six-hour-plus epic, five years in the making, reputedly featured a cast of 120,000, including soldiers drawn from the Red Army for the battle and ballroom scenes. Some dramatic stiffness aside, this is one of those movies you have to see to believe, preferably on a big screen, with a bowl of borscht at intermission.

L'Argent (1983) Directed by Robert Bresson

The French master's last work, and one Tolstoy adaptation that can lay claim to cinematic greatness, was based on the first part of the author's posthumously published novella, The Forged Coupon , which follows a devastating chain of consequences after a student passes a counterfeit cheque.

Two Jacks (2012) Directed by Bernard Rose

British director Rose is cinema's most devoted Tolstoyan, with Anna Karenina (1997), Ivansxtc (2000), The Kreutzer Sonata (2008) and Boxing Day (2012). Two Jacks (which played at Montreal and Vancouver film festivals this past fall but is not yet released in theatres) is based on Tolstoy's short novel Two Hussars , about two generations of cavalry men. In Rose's version, Danny Huston stars as a carousing Hollywood director and his real-life nephew, Jack Huston (the half-masked sniper from Boardwalk Empire ), plays his son. The cast includes Sienna Miller and Jacqueline Bisset as the same woman, 20 years later.

– Liam Lacey

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These are the only Anna Karenina adaptations you actually need to know about.

The news out of Moscow/wherever Netflix is headquartered today is that the streaming giant has set a contemporary reimagining of Anna Karenina as its first-ever Russian original drama series.

For the ignorant among you, Leo Tolstoy’s epic 1878 novel — considered by many to be the greatest work of literature ever written — is the tale of a beautiful but unhappily married Muscovite who begins an affair with a dashing young calvary officer. When their dalliance is discovered, scandalizing Russian high society, Anna’s world begins to unravel and, well, locomotive tragedy ensues.

As you would expect, Anna Karenina has been adapted many, many, many times over the past century. Based on my extensive research , there have been fifteen movies, six television series, four ballets, four operas, two musicals, one lonely play, and even a steampunk mash-up novel based on the 800-page opus.

Now, we (I) don’t have the time (inclination) to run through them all, but here are five of the most, eh, heralded , so you can choo-choo-choose your own favorite:

Anna Karenina (1935) dir. Clarance Brown

The most famous and critically-acclaimed of all the Annas Karenina, Greta Garbo’s anguished performance became the yardstick against which all future screen Annas were measured. As Graham Greene wrote at the time: “it is Greta Garbo’s personality which ‘makes’ this film, which fills the mould of the neat respectful adaptation with some kind of sense of the greatness of the novel.”

This subtle, Garbo-forward trailer for the film (which clocks in at an impressively condensed 95 minutes) is well worth a watch.

Android Karenina , Ben Winters (2010)

Tolstoy’s timeless tale of passion and betrayal reimagined as a parodic steampunk mashup by the author of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters . In an alternate reality tsarist Russia, a miracle metal, gronzium, has fueled the development of a robust robo-culture, but human loins are still a-burnin’. Said Publishers Weekly of the hybrid: “The sci-fi elements are carefully accomplished, sometimes brilliantly extrapolated from the original. The Class IIIs, for example, also act as telling externalizations of their masters: cold, duty-bound Karenin becomes half-robot and childish Kitty gets a pink, mechanized ballerina companion. Tolstoy’s text is more than strong enough to stand up to this sort of treatment, its force attenuated just enough to allow Winters to integrate his additions—a feat he manages with aplomb.”

Anna Karenina (2012) dir. Joe Wright

Audiences were a little cold on Joe Wright’s lush, overwrought, Tom Stoppard-scripted 2012 adaptation. The theatrical scaffolding and Wright’s emphasis on opulent style over meaty novelistic substance rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, and I suppose they’re not wrong. I remember enjoying it, though. It looks absolutely gorgeous and Kiera Knightly and Jude Law acquit themselves admirably. According to my wife, however, Count Vronsky should have been played by sinister sex symbol Tom Hiddleson, rather than the then-somewhat-adolescent-looking Aaron Taylor-Johnson. “Hiddles exudes a much more confident sexual energy,” she explained. Can’t argue with that.

Anna Karenina , Aleks Kontr, 2017

Less an adaptation than an erotic fever dream made gloriously manifest, this eye-catching artistic interpretation of Anna’s liberated lifestyle/tragic end by the New York-based fusion painter  Aleks Kontr  (“The New York Magazine asked him in an interview: ‘Don’t you think is overdose of Attractive Erotic World in your Artworks?’ and my answer was: ‘Nudity Save the World!'”) can be yours for just $2000. If money’s tight right now, don’t fret; you can always purchase one of these stylish tote bags for mere $24.

Anna Karenina (2020) dir. My wife Starring: My dog and I

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Critic’s Pick

‘Mary Jane’ Review: When Parenting Means Intensive Care

Amy Herzog’s heartbreaker arrives on Broadway with Rachel McAdams as the alarmingly upbeat mother of a fearfully sick child.

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By Jesse Green

Soon after Alex was born at 25 weeks, with multiple catastrophic disorders, Mary Jane’s husband, unable to cope, fled their marriage. Still, she hopes he “finds some peace, I really do.”

She also thinks kindly of her boss, who means to accommodate her but pretty much fails to. “It’s daily moral agony for her,” Mary Jane marvels. “It’s really something to behold.”

Mary Jane’s own moral agony is likewise something to behold. She feels guilty about putting the super of her Queens building, where she shares a junior one-bedroom with Alex, in a difficult position by removing the window guards. “It’s just that he loves looking out the windows, especially when he’s sick and I can’t take him outside?” she explains in upspeak.

“It’s the law,” the not-unkind super replies — though Alex, now 2, can barely sit up, let alone reach the sill.

“You’re an excellent superintendent,” Mary Jane says. She is the embodiment of apologizing for living.

That, at its heart, is the condition that Amy Herzog’s steel-trap play “Mary Jane” explores: The death of the self in the love for one’s child. As with Alex, so for his mother: There is no cure.

When it was produced in 2017 at New York Theater Workshop, I called “Mary Jane” “ a heartbreaker for anyone human .” You did not need to be a parent, though it helped, to get dragged down by the undertow of terror beneath its placid, warm surface.

The Manhattan Theater Club production that opened on Tuesday, starring the rom-dram charmer Rachel McAdams, confirms that earlier diagnosis. But Herzog , whose Broadway adaptation of “An Enemy of the People” is running a few blocks away, is not interested in locking down meaning. Like all great plays, “Mary Jane” catches light from different directions at different times, revealing different ideas. On the other side of the worst of Covid, “Mary Jane” feels less like a parent’s cry for more life than an inquest into the meaning of death.

I didn’t notice that at first. The story spooled out, swiftly but subtly, along its original lines: a series of Mary Jane’s often surprisingly funny interactions with eight women, four in each of the play’s two parts. First, the super (Brenda Wehle) plunges the kitchen sink, making uncomfortable small talk about holistic therapies. (Mary Jane respectfully hears her out.) Next comes Sherry (April Matthis), the most reliable of the home nurses who help tend to Alex. Mary Jane displaces anxiety about changes in the boy’s condition onto concern for Sherry’s garden in wet weather.

Not that she is aware of how rigidly upbeat she seems; it’s Herzog’s technique that makes even the dullest conversation feel as sharp as a scalpel. Brianne (Susan Pourfar), a newbie to the world of adaptive strollers and insurance wrangling, is overcome by Mary Jane’s glib you-can-do-it curriculum, in which caring for Alex (we never see him) sounds as easy as caring for his goldfish. And when Alex has a seizure while Sherry’s niece Amelia (Lily Santiago) is visiting, Mary Jane calmly thanks the 911 operator. Twice.

As her life relocates to a neonatal intensive care unit in Part 2 — there is no intermission — the supporting actors return in new guises. Matthis is now a thoughtful but busy doctor, surprised by Mary Jane’s continuing denial; Santiago a music therapist with a knack for arriving when Alex is asleep.

Two other women, a sharp-tongued Orthodox mother (Pourfar) and a robed Buddhist chaplain (Wehle), lead the play gently into a spiritual realm. For the mother, her daughter’s illness is clarifying, the nearness of death becoming the only real thing in life. For the chaplain, it seems, there is nothing to do but face the suffering of both without rancor.

This turn toward questions of faith, and the way they finally breach Mary Jane’s defenses, took me by surprise. I hadn’t remembered the play that way, perhaps because I’d seen it first through parental tears. Now, as its chorus of diverse women suggests, it seems to be about everyone’s participation in loss.

What has changed? Other than a brief allusion to the pandemic, little in the script. The shrewd staging, by Anne Kauffman, looks and sounds much the same, too. Lael Jellinek’s set performs its wondrous midcourse transformation; Leah Gelpe’s soundtrack of susurrations and beeps implies what the rest keeps hidden. New to the production, Brenda Abbandandolo delivers pinpoint costumes (the Orthodox mother’s outfit is a triumph) and Ben Stanton makes marvelous images from streetlights, night lights and hospital fluorescents. The cast, returning or not, is unimprovable.

It’s McAdams, with her fetching warmth, who alters the temperature. If Carrie Coon’s more businesslike approach in 2017 was also valid, the greater distance between McAdams’s natural sunniness and Mary Jane’s reality enhances the play’s tension. It leaves you to wonder what Mary Jane was like before Alex’s illness gave overwhelming purpose to her life — and, more painfully and permanently, what she will be like after it no longer does.

Mary Jane Through June 2 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com . Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for The Times. He writes reviews of Broadway, Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, regional and sometimes international productions. More about Jesse Green