I spent several hours today watching Joe Wright's 2012 film adaptation of Lev Tolstoy's great novel Anna Karenina (1875-1877, 1878). Critics at the time of the film's release, as they tend to do in general, disagreed about the quality of the film when it came out. Some liked it. Some were lukewarm towards it. Some did not like it at all. Many, I suspect, even ignored it. Needless to say, such disparate views point up the empirical fact that beauty and value are in the socialised eyes of the beholder.
I found the response of one particularly "critic", the "critic" who wrote the capsule "review" for Leonard Maltin's 2014 Movie Guide, particularly interesting since it was so bizarre. This critic was at a loss as to why Wright set some of the scenes in a decaying theatre. He apparently did not notice, as those who have read and studied Anna Karenina and Tolstoy likely did, that Wright metaphorically and allegorically counterpoints the scenes in the film set in a decaying and decrepit theatres in Moscow and Petersburg, scenes dominated by the mannered, ritualistic, self-righteous, hypocritical and Westernising Russian elite, to the naturalistic rural scenes focusing on Levin and eventually Kitty, the space and the characters that were for Tolstoy metaphors for the "authentic" Russia, the "real" Russia. It would be, of course, this holier than thou Russian elite who, because of their ostracisation of Anna, would drive Anna to commit suicide by falling on tracks as a train passed, something that should also tell us something about Tolstoy's sense of morality and ethics.
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