It's not love, but fate

So says Joshua Rothman in an enlightening account of why we shouldn't confuse the movie version of Anna Karenina (directed by British filmmaker Joe Wright and screen-written by Tom Stoppard) with Leo Tolstoy's novel of the same name.

Anna Karenina the film, according to Rothman, predicates itself on romantic love, whereas Tolstoy's is not a love story: "if anything, it is a warning against the myth and the cult of love." 

I agree with Rothman when he says that it wouldn't have been possible for Tolstoy to conceive of a romantic love story, not because Tolstoy didn't have a romantic bone in his body, but because he had conceived of love as one of the many significant things that, when indulged in without discretion, can have extreme consequences:

Tolstoy, when he wrote the novel, was thinking about love in a different way: as a kind of fate, or curse, or judgment, and as a vector by which the universe distributes happiness and unhappiness, unfairly and apparently at random.

Rothman's reflective piece makes me want to read Anna Karenina--again.

Re-interpreters

The screenplays of two recent films, Stephen Spielberg's Lincoln and Joe Wright's Anna Karenina, have been written by Tony Kushner and Tom Stoppard respectively.

Good sign--a reinterpretation of timeless classics by writers known for being irreverent (as well as gifted) toward tradition.

A.O. Scott rightly says in his review of Anna Karenina, famous works of literature--and to this might I add famous figures of history like Lincoln and Gandhi--need to be treated not as "sacred artifacts" and paid "anxious obeisance" and pointless "humility," but as "lumps of interesting materials" to be shaped by re-interpreters willing to be "strong" and "striking" in their rendition.