Anna and the King: DVD & Movie Review

8/29/2007 Posted by Admin

A grand telling of an iconic story

(Originally reviewed Dec. 19, 1999)

Andy Tennant’s Academy Award-winning “Anna and the King” is a grand retelling of Anna Leonowens’ diaries, those vivid accounts of a prim Victorian schoolteacher dispatched to Siam in 1862 to tutor King Mongkut’s 58 children and introduce them to Western culture.

Her story is hardly new. In 1946, Rex Harrison and Irene Dunn starred in “Anna and the King of Siam,” in 1956 Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner sang and danced to Rodgers and Hammerstein in “The King and I,” last year Warner Brothers offered an animated debacle of the story, and Broadway recently explored a stage version in a Tony Award-winning musical.

Now, Leonowens’ diaries are given their most lavish treatment to date in a film that pairs down its strong personalities in favor of whistling a post-feminist tune.

As visually sumptuous as Martin Scorsese’s “Kundun” and Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor,” “Anna and the King” is filmmaking on an epic scale. It’s no musical, but it does takes its cues from nearly all of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s songs, especially “Getting to Know You,” “A Puzzlement” and “Shall We Dance?,” which screenwriters Steve Meerson and Peter Krikes seamlessly wed to their literate script.

As Anna, Jodie Foster is more willful and daring than her predecessors, but her humorless, tight-lipped performance comes at a price: She doesn’t inhabit Anna the person so much as she inhabits Anna the icon. As good as Foster is--and sometimes she’s very good--the white-knuckled force driving her performance is more cerebral than soul, which translates on screen during her initial flirtations with Mongkut.

Luckily, director Tennant has Hong Kong action star Chow Yun-Fat to lift those moments. His Mongkut is no barking, foot-stomping caricature; instead, he’s a charming, humane king who perfectly complements Foster’s Anna, a frigid woman who eventually thaws as this relationship gathers emotional steam.

Grade: A-