Cultural riptide

Steve Sailer reviews Anna Karenina:

[M]ost remarkably, Wright’s film may be the first of the numerous Anna Karenina adaptations whose sympathies lie firmly with her cuckolded husband, the unsexy bureaucrat Karenin.  For example, in Vivien Leigh’s 1948 Anna, Ralph Richardson played the husband as a stuffed shirt. But Jude Law (who is transitioning gracefully from not-quite-a-leading-man into a major character actor) gets to portray Karenin as a hero. Law’s Karenin is the type of competent public servant who has been all too rare in Russia’s unfortunate history.

It is far too soon to tell; this may simply be an outlier.  And yet, it is rather remarkable to see Hollywood move away from the "woman as victim" model it has been relentlessly pushing on audiences for decades.  If one reads Flaubert and Tolstoy, it's clear that they see the adulterous wife as the villain, while the filmmakers often preferred to see the villains as anti-heroes.  Now that so many young men have grown up in homes where their mother left their father, or they've never even had a father, it is arguably going to become harder and harder to sell the idea of women being intrinsically pedestal-worthy by virtue of their sex.