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" TORONTO \u2014 The film-festival season \u2014 which, let&amp;#039;s face it, is mainly Oscar-bait season \u2014 has been dominated by adaptations of the highest of high-art literary material. Having run out of Jane Austens, movies have turned to weirder sources. In Toronto alone, there&amp;#039;s been Deepa Mehta&amp;#039;s version of Salman Rushdie&amp;#039;s Midnight&amp;#039;s Children, Tom Hanks in Cloud Atlas, the 3-D Life of Pi, Julianne Moore in What Maisie Knew, and virtually every other A-list actress in America in On the Road. Ironically, the most relevant and most contemporary of all these may well be the oldest: Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightley. The century-old character is completely of the moment.  Tolstoy&amp;#039;s novel has been adapted at least a dozen times, never completely successfully. This is the best adaptation. It is not the best because of its screenplay, even though it was written by Tom Stoppard. It certainly isn&amp;#039;t the best because of the direction, which operates on a hackneyed play-within-a-play conceit that is theater-school production stuff. It&amp;#039;s the best because of Keira Knightley. Not only does she have the perfect facial structure for Anna \u2014 the easy aristocracy, the letter-opener cheekbones, the neck so delicate that it appears breathing would cause it to bruise. She exudes the hunger of Anna Karenina. I don&amp;#039;t think she even has to work at it. It&amp;#039;s the same hunger she exudes all the time, in her ads for perfume or when she does that pouty thing with her lips on the cover of magazines. It is the hunger for more, to be ineffable, glorious. It&amp;#039;s exactly that ineffable hunger that makes the novel and Knightley&amp;#039;s performance of its main character so totally relevant to the moment.  Keira Knightley, I assume, shares little in common with the material conditions of Anna Karenina. She doesn&amp;#039;t live in pre-Imperial Russia; she isn&amp;#039;t the legal property of a husband or a lover; she doesn&amp;#039;t have kids. But she clearly shares Anna&amp;#039;s hunger. The question of the novel is why a woman married to a good and decent man with a beautiful son would abandon all the love and all the privileges of her regular life for Vronsky, who, other than being handsome, has little going for him, and whom she has to know will move on. Elif Batuman&amp;#039;s mother&amp;#039;s theory, contained in her excellent book on a modern-day obsession with Russian literature, The Possessed, is that her husband is the kind of man who doesn&amp;#039;t like women, and Vronsky is the kind of man who does like women. And any self-loving woman would want to be with a man who likes women. Which sounds sensible but only goes so far.  When the novel begins, Anna has it all \u2014 everything a woman of standing could desire. But all the world has isn&amp;#039;t enough for her. In short, what she wants is to live in fiction, to be a character. And of course that&amp;#039;s what she becomes. Keira Knightley&amp;#039;s eyes, even in other movies, do this thing where they shift back and forth, like she can&amp;#039;t tell whether she&amp;#039;s in fiction or in real life. It&amp;#039;s perfect for Anna.  She doesn&amp;#039;t just want to have more things, more sex, more fun, more beautiful objects. She wants to be more. She wants the world to be more than it is. Anna Karenina is so contemporary because she craves glamour \u2014 and that&amp;#039;s what Keira Knightley gives her. You can&amp;#039;t place bets on the Oscars yet, at least not on the best actress category. But it&amp;#039;s hard to imagine, even at this early date, that she won&amp;#039;t be high up in the running. I mean, if you&amp;#039;re looking for Oscar bait, Anna Karenina is a bucket of chum for circling members of the academy. In Knightley, we finally have an Anna Karenina for our times. TORONTO 2012: Read Marche and More Live from the Film Festival on The Culture Blog &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a15722/anna-karenina-toronto-review-12572320/>