'Anna Karenina" won the Oscar for best costume design this year, and like many a period literary adaptation, you might assume the frocks and greatcoats are the main attraction, the "value added" to what is necessarily a leaner version of an epic novel. Certainly director Joe Wright, who filmed Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" in 2005, knows the drill.
For his adaptation of Leo Tolstoy, though, Wright opts for a quite different approach, setting nearly all the action in a theater, on what are clearly constructed, highly stylized sets; we even see the extras changing costumes backstage as they move from scene to scene. Only when he moves out into the vast Russian steppes does Wright use some actual location shots. (Which certainly accents the difference Tolstoy himself drew between the self-absorbed cities versus the God-given natural world.)
Wright's reasoning here was that life in the Russian aristocratic society of the late 19th century was conducted so publicly, and with so much artifice, it was essentially theater. You could probably say that about celebrity life in any era, including our own, so it's slightly fuzzy reasoning, but the results certainly feel fresh. I might be off-base here, but Wright has spent some time in India — researching a film that never came to fruition, and with his musician wife Anoushka Shankar — and it feels like a bit of Bollywood glitz, that tendency to take a scene's set design well over the top, has seeped into his bloodstream. Or it could be a Brechtian ploy; take your pick.