Release Date: September 1, 2004
Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Romola Garai, James Purefoy, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Bob Hoskins, Eileen Atkins, Jim Broadbent, Gabriel Byrne
Directed by: Mira Nair
Written by: Matthew Faulk, Julian Fellowes, Mark Skeet
Distributed by: Focus Features
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (some sensuality/partial nudity, a brief violent image)
Show the average moviegoer a copy of William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1848 novel Vanity Fair (which, depending on the edition, could be over two inches thick) and a two-and-a-half-minute trailer for a sexy, new film adaptation of the book directed by Mira Nair and starring Reese Witherspoon, and the moviegoer will almost certainly choose the film. But Vanity Fair the movie, as adapted by screenwriters Matthew Faulk, Julian Fellowes, and Mark Skeet, is a rambling, sprawling narrative mess -- sexy at two-and-a-half minutes, to be sure, but not in its two-and-a-half-hour entirety.
Witherspoon draws the role of the novel’s main character, the antiheroine Becky Sharp, and delivers a performance that many critics have called plucky. But, watching the film, you will get the sense that these reviewers are responding mostly to a preconceived idea of Witherspoon, the actress of saccharine romantic comedies like Legally Blonde, and not the character she plays in Vanity Fair.
Her rendition of Becky Sharp -- an orphaned debutante determined to climb English society’s ladder through skill, wiles, and sex appeal -- is a competent but ultimately boring one, which hints, only elusively, at the character’s deliciously despicable self-serving nature. The same viewers who found Witherspoon charming in The Importance of Being Earnest will find her insufferable here; she does not have the screen presence or the talent to carry a real movie of any heft.
The movie begins as Becky leaves finishing school with her best friend Amelia Sedley (Romola Garai, who takes the part too seriously). Amelia is engaged to marry the arrogant George Osborne (a lukewarm Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), while Becky has a job as a governess for the children of the amicably disgusting Sir Pitt Crawley (Bob Hoskins). While in the service of Sir Pitt, Becky meets and charms two of his relations, albeit in much different ways: His sister Matilda (Eileen Atkins) takes an immediate liking to Becky’s social adroitness (though it’s hard to see where she got that idea from Witherspoon’s performance), while his nephew Rawdon (James Purefoy), a soldier, takes a fancy to, well, other things about Becky.
Eventually she marries Rawdon, accompanies him to London’s prestigious Mayfair district, bears him a child or two, and then watches her insatiable ego and an endless desire to accrue more status and social trappings unravel her marriage -- except that many of these events don’t have a place in a film that is already overwhelmed by the prospect of covering such a vast tableau of characters, times, and conflicts. Two of the most recent productions of Vanity Fair have been public-television miniseries that have had the luxury of spreading the events out over many installments; this novel is simply too massive for a single feature.
You can see the scriptwriters trying to piece things together as the movie goes (one of them, Julian Fellowes, had much more success at this in his Gosford Park); characters enter and exit quickly and abruptly, and in some cases at the expense of what could’ve been very enjoyable performances. Hoskins has a good time as the self-admittedly decrepit lord Pitt. Jim Broadbent turns up occasionally (but not nearly often enough) to put a bit of his always-watchable pomposity on George Osborne’s father. And Gabriel Byrne, who plays the Marquess of Steyne, a iron-willed cad who runs into Becky as a child and then later as an adult, floats around the edges of the picture with an icy, vaguely sinister demeanor that hints at a much more complex character.
This 31-flavors approach is saved, as it is in almost all period costume dramas, by the production values, which are exquisite. The various manors and country homes, estates and Mayfair apartments, streets and stables, and battlefields and brothel houses that the story and camera find their way into are all there in resplendent, remarkable detail. Even if it sometimes feels like we’ve taken a trip back in time with Elle Woods, Witherspoon’s character from the Legally Blonde movies, the sets and costumes still have that crucial ring of authenticity.
And even if Becky Sharp has been mostly de-clawed by Witherspoon’s performance and the script’s superficial approach, there is still a decent degree of satisfaction in her inevitable downfall. But director Nair, who was born, like Thackeray, in India, and had a successful career in Bollywood before directing mainstream American features, is determined to get the audience to like Becky, something Thackeray never attempted to do. To her credit, some readers have enjoyed the character, but even liberally speaking, I would say not nearly enough to justify such a directorial ambition.
Then again, Nair has shown quite a bit of ambition in attempting such blatantly non-cinematic material like Vanity Fair altogether. You might be tempted to compare Nair to Becky Sharp, especially if Nair lands a bigger or more prestigious directing gig after this, except that Becky’s doings had certain kind of logic, and her undoing was mostly complete. Vanity Fair, on the other hand, is yet another of Hollywood’s ill-conceived, half-hearted, and inconsequential attempts to inject classic literature with a bit of sexiness, ostensibly to make it relevant to modern-day audiences; the results are frustratingly mixed.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)