All that Tolstoyan erotica and jealousy and judgment, confined to a stage.

In Dogville, the 2003 Danish drama starring Nicole Kidman as a woman on the run from the mob, director Lars Von Trier decided to tell his story with the barest of sets and scenery. Instead of a mining town's streets and buildings and mountains, he used exposed plywood facades and white painted outlines marked on a giant hangar's floor. Minimalism, so nothing distracts from the raw emotion at play.

Joe Wright, in his lovely adaptation of Tolstoy's oft-adapted Anna Karenina, takes a not-dissimilar approach. Although the gowns and props and furnishings reflect the affluence of Imperial Russian society circa 1874, and minimalism is hardly the filmmaker's marching order, the action takes place within the confines of a big old theater: not just on the proscenium, but in the loges and balconies, backstage and down the hall to the dressing rooms, on the catwalks and in the foyer. All the world's a stage, and in this new Anna Karenina - with Keira Knightley, Wright's muse from Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, in the title role - all the love and longing, anguish and ardor, the triangular tragedy of Anna and Count Vronsky and the cuckold Alexei, takes place within its confines.

Wright breaks from this gilded artifice only when the action moves to Levin's farm in the country - all of a sudden we're in a real world of fields and forest and sky. And in a few inspired moments, the two worlds collide. No, not collide, but merge - the real and the theatrical rubbing shoulders.

So, in this very significant way, Wright's Anna Karenina will either inspire or annoy audiences. (The deliberate staginess isn't rendered with as much hopped-up craziness as Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge, say, but there are flashes of Baz-ness here, to be sure.)

Which brings us to the story at hand: the helpless tumble into the throes of infidelity, as Anna meets the handsome rake Vronsky (a somehow lacking Aaron Taylor-Johnson), endangering her dull but comfortable marriage to Alexei (a bespectacled, brooding Jude Law). Despite the tsk-tsking of all of Moscow and St. Petersburg society, Anna throws herself headlong into the affair. Things can only end badly.

Knightley brings palpable anguish to her performance - and erotic elation, too: "I'm like a beggar who has been given food," she sighs, in the aftermath of amour. And she is wonderful as she seeks the counsel of Dolly (Kelly Macdonald), her sister-in-law, wed to an adulterer, and ruing her own faithfulness. And Knightley looks smashing in her veils and jewels, her dresses and stoles, with shoulder blades aquiver in ecstasy and despair.

Wright, a Brit, has cast his grand crowd of Russian nobles and landowners with (mostly) his fellow countrymen (and -women): Olivia Williams as Vronsky's disapproving countess mother; Matthew Macfadyen as Oblonsky, Anna's brother, a civil servant; Domhnall Gleeson as Levin, the earnest farmer who declares his love for Kitty (Dolly's younger sister); Emily Watson and Shirley Henderson in smaller roles. Speaking of Kitty, she is played by Alicia Vikander, the Swedish actress currently on screens in another sumptuous period piece, A Royal Affair.

It's hard not to admire Wright's bold approach to Anna Karenina's story of longing and jealousy and societal condemnation. And the boldness rubs off on some of the actors, who exude a kind of "Look Ma, no realism!" enthusiasm for their roles and the context they find themselves in. Still, Wright, Knightley, and company's turn on Tolstoy's opus - with a script by Tom Stoppard - never achieves true greatness. True cleverness, yes, and flashes of deep and true emotion, but only flashes.EndText