Joe Wright's film is Tolstoy's novel, adapted by Tom Stoppard, and it keeps the double plot the book is built on: Anna and Vronsky set against Levin and Kitty, the affair that destroys a woman beside the marriage that makes a man. The staging is its one large departure. Nearly everything set in Russian society is played inside a decaying theatre, and the scenes that leave it are the scenes on Levin's land. That is an argument about the novel rather than a break from it: society as performance, the countryside as the only place anything is real.