Romancefest 25: Anna Karenina

When the 1935 version of ANNA KARENINA came to an end, I decided to rewatch the final half hour. The tragic ending is pretty famous, so it's not that I was surprised. It's just that I felt the first half of the movie was so clumsy and misguided in setting up the story that when the final few scenes slammed everything home so efficiently I had to take a second look.

Based on the Tolstoy novel some say is the greatest novel ever written (that I've never read), the movie stars Greta Garbo as the title character, a high profile aristocrat in an unhappy marriage who loves her son. To outsiders, she seems to have everything together. Her drunk, womanizing soldier brother (Reginald Owen) comes to her for advice when his wife (Phoebe Foster) is on the verge of leaving him because he hasn't been faithful. Anna patches it all together, explaining men have affairs and it's to be expected and you're just supposed to put up with it.

Similarly, she helps hook her sister-in-law (Maureen O'Sullivan) up with a suitor she doesn't particularly want to settle for (Gyles Isham) because it's the proper thing to do, rather than let her keep on chasing after a guy who isn't interested in her.

This guy is Vronsky, another soldier and friend of Anna's brother. As played by Fredric March he's one of the biggest weaknesses of the first half of the film. His performance is bland, and you don't really buy it when he falls immediately in love with Anna, despite the stunning shot when he first sees her emerging from the steam blown by a train. That's foreshadowing, everyone. It's disappointing, too, since he was so good in DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE a few years before.

Anna slowly warms up to him, first at a dance in Moscow and then back in St. Petersburg, where Vronsky follows her. He unabashedly and aggressively courts Anna as she attempts to explain she has a high profile husband and a son that she loves. Vronsky doesn't care, even going so far as to suggest that she forget about her son. This doesn't endear the audience to Vronsky, partially because there doesn't seem to be any chemistry between Garbo and March but also because some of the best scenes where Garbo really relaxes and turns on the charm are between Anna and her son (Freddie Bartholomew). Up to this point I was assuming the movie wanted me to want Anna and Vronsky to get together, but around this time I started wondering if that was what the movie was really about.

The super awesome Basil Rathbone shows up as Anna's husband to complicate things, both for the plot and for me. He doesn't want Anna running around with Vronsky and feeding the gossip hounds, but he also doesn't believe in divorce. He doesn't seem to love her and she doesn't seem to love him, and as always, Rathbone seems effortlessly evil and ruthless. Still, you can kind of see where he's coming from. I mean, it's annoying how Vronsky is always lurking around, sometimes right in front of Anna's husband, clearly trying to swoop in and steal her away. Any man would be annoyed whether they had good or evil intentions. Also, Rathbone's performance is so strong that he overshadows most of the rest of the movie. Sure, he's unfair, but at least he seems to have a point of view, unlike Vronsky.

So, they're clearly trying to portray the cuckolded husband as evil, which supports the theory you're supposed to be rooting for Anna and Vronsky's affair. But, you don't want Anna to leave her son and you don't particularly like Vronsky, so maybe you're not supposed to root for them. This is where the last half hour kicks in and the movie suddenly gets an opinion.

I don't want to give anything away, but Vronsky gets a chance to go off and fight a war and suddenly seems way more into his soldier career than he ever seemed into Anna, which disturbs her. Has she thrown away her previous life for a guy who's just going to run off to war, now that he has conquered Anna? Will he forget about her now that he's gotten what he wants? Was this worth giving up her kid for?

Later, Anna takes a trip back to visit her brother and sister-in-law and sees the results of her interventions in the early scenes of the movie -- her brother's still running around on his wife, and his wife says she would have left him if Anna hadn't intervened. This doesn't sit so well with Anna, who now has a different perspective on the whole cheating game. Meanwhile her sister-in-law has a kid and is married to Levin, who thanks Anna for intervening early in their romance and hooking them up. Again, Anna has a different point of view now and isn't sure she did the right thing.

So, we start to see that the movie has a point after all and we should have trusted it from the beginning. I think the main component that made the film hard to buy at first was the lack of chemistry between the two leads and the rushed narrative. There should have been some more courtship, some more examples of why Anna would even be into Vronsky in the first place, and that would have distracted the audience from the moral implications of the affair until later in the film.

Garbo, like the movie itself, grew on me as the story developed. At times she seems so sleepy and slow, like she can't be bothered to really show up and perform, but I think that's just her style and it's not like it's a mistake that she's coming off that way. It works to her advantage when she hits emotional heights for the sake of contrast, but it also works against her in a story that should be at least halfway about passion.

I bought the tragic results. I didn't buy the passion that started it.