Tag: Kelly Macdonald

Anna Karenina

Is there something stopping Joe Wright from just making a musical? The production design in “Anna Karenina” is sumptuous in its color and glamour, but it’s out of place putting these Russian costume drama characters in an old-fashioned playhouse, a constant and misguided reminder that the whole world is a stage and we be but players on it.

Set in a rustic theater, Wright shuffles around sets and props on a single sound stage with balletic precision to transport Tolstoy’s sprawling novel to new places and move through the story at a brisk pace. It’s a daring approach, but Wright either needs to commit to his gimmick or drop it entirely. Seemingly at random we see a character in flowing evening ware clambering up back stage rafters. Sometimes a background figure will appear and perform a pirouette or strike up a tune on a tuba, and at other times the movie will forget the stage conceit altogether.

God knows this is a pretty film to look at, but boy is it garish. A curtain will rise and a multi-million dollar backdrop posing Anna as an angel in a Renaissance painting will be for nothing more than a momentary distraction. It indulges in undulating bodies during love-scenes and bathes its forbidden lovers in glaring doses of white. Wright’s long takes and wide shots are visually mystifying at times, but he chops the story up so much to account for the aesthetic.

It tells the story of Anna’s (Keira Knightley) affair with Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a decorated soldier once engaged to Anna’s younger sister. The two carry on without concern from Anna’s lifeless husband Karenin (Jude Law), but when she seeks a divorce and reveals she’s pregnant, the law prevents her from ever seeing her children again.

Even in a story of many characters and romantic threads, Wright’s approach feels thin, undermining the novel’s themes of forgiveness in love because his visual flourishes don’t say all they’re meant to. Knightley is typecast in roles like this, but she’s overacting in her attempt to be bigger than the scenery. It doesn’t help that Taylor-Johnson and his silly mustache are miscast.

I’ve been a big champion of Wright’s over-stylized departures into genre territory before (“Atonement,” “Hanna”), but this time he’s drawn too much spectacle out of the sport.

2 ½ stars

Brave

The first big selling point of “Brave” was that it was the first Pixar film to feature a female lead. The second was that it was not “Cars 2.”

But “Brave” is sadly disappointing in both of those respects. It falls short of creating an original and authoritative female character that can go in the canon of Disney Princesses, and it is so madcap and silly that it becomes exhausting.

Princess Merida (Kelly Macdonald) is not the only movie princess who has been poised with the task of accepting an arranged marriage. She’s a plucky young tomboy with wild red hair and a sharp eye with her bow and arrow, and yet her mother, Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson), demands that she become prim and proper such that she can select a husband from the kingdom’s three clans.

All three princes are embarrassing dopes, so Merida defies her mother by besting the three of them at archery and then enlisting the help of a witch to change her mother’s mind about the necessity of marriage. This unfortunately, in the witch’s terms, means transforming Elinor into a bear.

Yes, a bear, and the bear gets awfully tiring when the bear starts doing things a bear cannot do, like pantomime or wear a tiara and clothes. Cartoon bears have been known to do things bears cannot do before, but less so in Pixar films. Usually when Pixar creates a maelstrom of action, they do so with the intent to provide beauty or enlightenment, as in the colorful bits in “Ratatouille” and “WALL-E” or even early on in “Brave” as Merida gallops through the forest doing target practice to the tune of an elegant song by Julie Fowlis.

Rather, much of the action in “Brave” is chaotic and clumsy, such as when a horde of Scottish soldiers chase a shadow through the halls of the castle. It goes on endlessly in the third act, as is customary of most films today for children or otherwise.

Merida is too safe and familiar to spark a revolution for women. The more interesting is Elinor, who is full of resolve and conviction as well as motherly tradition, but she doesn’t get to do much talking when she becomes the aforementioned bear. That silence on her part paves the way for more comic relief bombast from the men, who are all one-dimensional. The King in particular is so cartoonishly massive that it’s impossible to take him seriously.

Granted, “Brave” is plain gorgeous. Pixar has never rendered landscapes this beautiful before, or with as much detail. The detail and realism of Merida’s red curls alone must’ve cost a fortune in CGI development.

But just as pretty is “La Luna,” the Oscar nominated Pixar short just before “Brave,” which gives a lesson of individuality through a lovely and original story about a boy, his father and his grandfather doing an odd job on the moon. It does so without words or action and leaves a warm, gooey feeling that comes as a welcome surprise to the noisy action of “Brave.”

So I guess to use a silly analogy, as Pixar aimed their bow and arrow, they hit the close target with the safe and formulaic film that is “Brave.” They should’ve however shot for the moon.

2 1/2 stars