“Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays the dashing Count Vronsky”
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“Dashing”? You use that word. It does not mean what you think it means.
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Seriously, I might have liked the film as much as you did (and I did like it quite a bit) if they had had an actor who actually WAS dashing. Instead ATJ plays Vronsky as an asexual, acharismatic little boy. It’s impossible to believe a basically good woman would betray her not-shown-to-be-bad husband out of Romantic heedlessness ... for this—the adultery equivalent of Wales. To have had the Jude Law of 10 or 15 years ago as Vronsky (VJM weeps).

Heh. Oh, I agree he’s a wussy little thing — but that’s part of what I like about this interpretation. Anna’s adultery is somewhat inexplicable — but then, adultery often is; and the film manages to sympathize with her without allowing us to root for the lovers. Adultery is always the “equivalent of Wales,” and often we can see it even when the adulterer can’t.
 
FWIW, Google offers two definitions of “dashing”: “Attractive in a romantic, adventurous way” and “Stylish or fashionable.” He certainly fits the latter definition. As for the former, he’s certainly good-looking, and the uniform gives him at least a minimum qualifying level of romantic / adventurous cred.
   
That said, at the time I wrote it I wasn’t entirely comfortable characterizing Vronsky as simply “dashing,” and at one point I had a balancing adjective (“callow,” “effete” or some such thing); but found that a) it was too many adjectives and b) I hadn’t time for all of them. Perhaps “effete” would have been a better final choice.

I think “dashing” refers here to the original literary character…

“Adultery is always the ‘equivalent of Wales’.”

In what sense that capital perjury isn’t?

I know you can’t have missed the allusion, and my point was clear and you even agreed with it as far as it went (that this guy playing Vronsky ain’t all that attractive). So I’m not sure what you’re saying. Isn’t adultery (or fornication) with Sophia Loren or George Clooney more explicable than Barbra Streisand or Harvey Keitel?

As for why Vronsky shouldn’t be a wussy little thing ... even when reading it I imagined him as more attractive than Anna. Hollywood kinda bollixed things up by conceiving it as an actress movie, hence getting Garbo (twice) and Leigh to play the lead. (What man could top that??)

But I think Vronsky’s attractiveness really should be part of his character—after all, just in dramatic terms, Anna catches him on the rebound and he’s with another woman before the novel’s over. It’s also part of Tolstoy’s point, he deliberately set up a whole cross-section of sexual couplings, legit and illegit, and the Anna-Vronsky affair is Tolstoy’s critique of the Romantic conception of sex as a swooning into self-forgetfulness in the face of beauty. The movies rarely even try for this (it’s hard to dramatize; not Wright’s fault) but their affair largely falls apart over boredom with each other because beauty, as such, doesn’t survive the end of novelty and the beginning of familiarity.