Jude Law Gave A Performance in Anna Karenina

a ghost story

It’s time to confess that for nearly a decade, a ghost has been haunting me. It appears to me as an unanswerable question, a question that strikes at the heart of nothing, a question that is of no use to anyone but my tormented soul. In the most unexpected moments, it comes back to me, startles me, frightens me. I stare into empty space just thinking, wondering if it will ever stop plaguing me. If I could commence a séance to get rid of the ghost, I would. This question that haunts me is bewildering, it’s evasive. It is “Why did Jude Law deliver A Performance in Anna Karenina?”

Let me explain. Anna Karenina is a perfectly fine movie, some would say a good movie (even though it has absolutely nothing to do with the Anna Karenina that was written by Leo Tolstoy when he sat down one day and asked “Why do women?” but I digress). In it, Kiera Knightly is doing Kiera Knightly and Domhnall Gleeson is trying his best to brood. But Jude Law. Jude Law believes this is the most important role he will ever play. Whereas Tolstoy wrote Alexei Karenin to be a symbol of rigidity, Jude Law has bigger dreams for him. He pathologizes and humanizes Alexei in the same breath, and does it in like, under fifteen minutes of screen time. Alexei to Jude Law is the poster child of societal conformity, and his performance reveals the shell of emptiness one becomes when your only belief systems lie in the opinions of others. It’s a tour de force, but one that makes you ask why? Why did Jude Law put his whole Judussy (Lawdussy?) into Anna Karenina?

I remember when this ghost arrived in our house. Over her newspaper one Sunday morning, my mother announced that the New York Times said Jude Law’s performance was riveting. The way she told it, the review might as well have not mentioned a single other element of the film. I looked up the article when writing this, and the only quote that mentions him is in parenthesis: “Karenin (played with heartbreaking tact by Jude Law.)”

And he was! Heartbreaking! Tactful! The performance confounded me, but not nearly to the extent it does now, now that I know that Jude Law has only ever been cast in movies to be hot. If Jude Law can Act with a capital A, why does he not do so regularly? What about the most stodgy character in Russian literature—a weak-willed husband who loves nothing and nobody but rules—what about THAT man made Jude Law say “Maybe I should do my job for once.”

Now. I think that celebrities should be allowed privacy and that we shouldn’t know anything about their private lives etc. I think parasocial relationships are bad etc. etc. But reader, I FLEW to Jude Law’s Wikipedia after rewatching this film recently. The only clues I obtained from my brief research are as follows:

1. His parents said they named him after “Hey Jude” as well as Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. No one names their kid after Jude the Obscure; that is a lie. If you name your kid after that person, you did not read that book. I’m sorry. You didn’t. He was just kind of there. But what this tells me is that his parents are pretentious. And pretentious people love Tolstoy. So perhaps he did it for them.

2. Maybe he senses the dark truth of his fame: that though he is objectively hot, he is not meaningfully hot.

3. Probably the most well-known thing about Jude Law is that he cheated on his fiancée with his nanny. Lots of Ben Affleck understudies are cheaters, (it comes with the territory) but c’mon. It doesn’t get any more cliché than that. He does a lot of humanitarian projects but it’s like, what if you were humanitarian to your wife? He is a two-time breaker-upper of marriages. So maybe in Anna Karenina he was playing himself….Or rather, who he wished he’d been….

Whew. I do not have any desire to plunge into Jude Law’s psyche as deeply as he plunged into Alexei’s. But this little question…it makes me laugh. It keeps me up at night. It gives me faith in the world. It says: people will surprise you. Even Boring Hot Men can surprise you. And that’s a lovely thing, really. So it is a ghost but a friendly ghost—a Casper. A ghost that tells us that every great performance begs us to question our strongly held opinions about other people, our very philosophies of the world, just as a certain stubborn Russian husband of Anna Karenina must.

But also:

All you really need to about Jude Law is that he is Someone-Who-Claims-His-Eyes-Change-Color. See here

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Monkey with headphones says

I’ve decided I’ll conclude these emails with what I believe the Best Monkey In the World is currently listening to. I love this monkey. He expresses the deep melancholy that comes with listening to music without projecting any irony the way we humans feel we must. Every newsletter I am going to tell you what the monkey is listening to. I steal this format from my favorite tweet of all time:

Perfume Genius @perfumegenius

🎵liberty liberty liberty....liberty....liberty...

But today the monkey is here:

when the sun goes down, and the band won’t play, i’ll always remember us this way…….

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Thanks for making it this far! I’m genuinely floored by how many people subscribed to this thing. Some of these will be silly, some serious; I have never been able to separate the two. This is mostly just for fun so if you see a typo….you can take that up with the K College registrar and English department; it is actually their fault for conferring me with a degree when I didn’t know (still don’t) how em dashes work. (Also shouldn’t em dash have a dash between em and dash? Wouldn’t that be fitting and cheeky? It would drive Derrida bananas but it would be something fun for the girls!)

Anyways, thank you.