Review

Review Date: 5-September-04
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Just OK

Vanity Fair (2004)

Last month, I reread Thackeray's Vanity Fair to refresh my memory before the new adaptation arrived in theaters. This was, of course, unjust to the movie, since it must (and does) take liberties with the book to make it fit a two-hour visual narrative and the interpretation of the director. But even if I hadn't revisited the source material, I believe Mira Nair's version would have left me underwhelmed, because the changes she makes deprive the story of its very core.

"Vanity Fair" chronicles the adventures of Becky Sharp (Reese Witherspoon), an orphan of scandalous pedigree who is determined to rise above her low station. Setting off into the world circa 1810, she lives off a succession of rich families while trolling for a husband and awaiting the chance to take fashionable London by storm. Thackeray describes his clever antiheroine as "not ... in the least kind or placable. All the world used her ill, said this young misanthropist, and we may be pretty certain that persons whom all the world treats ill, deserve entirely the treatment they get." Take a look at the poster for the film and you see that her literary reputation precedes her: Becky Sharp is a tough, sexy cookie who knows what she wants and isn't afraid to grab it. Yet take a look at the movie itself and you see something else. Witherspoon's Becky is an unremarkable woman with the standard amount of ambition and compassion, a person who deserves pity for struggling with an unfair society rather than disgust (or admiration) for being a calculating bitch who would eat her own young. As such, her story loses a lot of its piquancy, for anybody who went to junior high already knows what it looks like when an average female, desperate but hopeful, tries to navigate a difficult social milieu.

With the central character toned down and rid of the cruelty that initially made her extraordinary, the others naturally follow suit. Becky's first swain is softened from a ridiculous blowhard to a lovelorn eccentric; the second is transformed from a dull lummox into a dashing, passionate lover (James Purefoy), whose heart Becky tragically and ruefully betrays. (In the book she sleeps in perfect peace after sending him off to war.) The movie also changes Becky's one-time employer, Pitt Crawley, from a dirty old man into a disheveled Bob Hoskins, and saddles the aptly named Lord Steyne (Gabriel Byrne) with all the blame for her indiscretions, making him a lifelong nemesis and the vicious author of her downfall instead of the ideal partner-in-crime for her wickedness.

Thackeray followed the paths of two women, one over-bad and one over-good, and Nair plays down the second by necessity. The movie would have been better served if she had omitted Amelia (Romola Garai) altogether, since her part of the story feels entirely perfunctory and climaxes in an abrupt and unsatisfying way. Amelia was written as the stupidly angelic antithesis of Becky, yet here she seems just as commonly desperate and hopeful, possessed of both love and bitterness. Her two suitors, the arrogant George Osborne (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and the perfectly noble William Dobbin (Rhys Ifans), remain true to their origins, but it's difficult to see (or care) why anyone would pay her the slightest attention.

By attempting to tell a story that's sympathetic toward women and actuated by social forces instead of narcissism, Nair ends up with a picture whose sumptuous exterior overlays not much of anything. (The costuming, which deliberately ignores time and place, is delicious.) Perhaps her Becky deserves the Scarlett O'Hara, live-to-see-another-day ending concocted by the screenwriters (in which Nair's native India becomes a sanctum of new beginnings), but this resolution pales in comparison with the rich, bittersweet conclusion of the book. Foolish but not wicked, misguided but not lost, Nair's characters lack the vanity which Thackeray exposed. The movie, therefore, is only passing fair.

Copyright © 2004 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.