A perfect match for Knightley

By ROGER MOORE
McCLATCHY NEWS SERVICE

The new “Anna Karenina” is as regal, romantic and tragic as ever. The Tolstoy tale of a bored wife and doting mother martyred by her scandalous love for a rakish cavalry officer in Imperial Russia is a perfect period vehicle for Keira Knightley, who always brings a chest-heaving sexuality to such pieces — even the understated romances of Jane Austen.

But her reunion with her “Pride & Prejudice” director Joe Wright has been stage-managed by the great playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard. And he’s given Tolstoy something no earlier screen version could claim — playfulness.

Stoppard, of “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead,” and Wright imagine the whole of Tolstoy’s rich canvas of 1870s Russia as a stage — the many melodramatic characters in his upper-crust soap opera mere players, actors stepping into the spotlight, leaning over the footlights, or ducking backstage where the ugly “real” world of just-freed peasants and poverty live among the catwalks and ropes used to raise and lower scenery.

A stellar cast waltzes through stunning sets, mixed with painted backdrops and model locomotives, some covered with snow from the pre-Soviet winters. It’s an obvious artifice that renders the over-the-top emotions and overly baroque decadence of Russia’s ruling classes, “polite society,” just a tad risible. And it’s a welcome touch.