director
Mira Nair
screenwriters
Matthew
Faulk
Julian Fellowes
Mark Skeet
based on
the novel by
William
Makepeace Thackeray
producers
Janette Day
Lydia Dean Pilcher
Donna Gigliotti
cinematographer
Declan Quinn
music
Mychael Danna
editor
Allyson C. Johnson
cast
Reese Witherspoon (Becky Sharp)
Gabriel Byrne (The Marquess of Steyne)
Ruth Sheen (Miss Pinkerton)
Romola Garai (Amelia Sedley)
Tony Maudsley (Joseph Sedley)
Rhys Ifans (William Dobbin)
Jonathan Rhys Meyers (George Osborne)
Bob Hoskins (Sir Pitt Crawley)
Douglas Hodge (Pitt Crawley)
Geraldine McEwan (Lady Southdown)
Eileen Atkins (Miss Matilda Crawley)
James Purefoy (Rawdon Crawley)
Jim Broadbent (Mr. Osborne)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 137m
u.s.
release: 9/1/04
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other mira
nair films
reviewed on this website:
- kama
sutra: a tale of love
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How do you take a book subtitled
"A Novel Without a Hero" and make a movie with the
tagline "A Heroine Will Rise"? Mira Nair's Vanity
Fair provides the answer: badly. William Makepeace Thackeray,
generally described as a cheerfully acerbic social satirist,
did not, I think, set out to inspire an uplifting rags-to-riches
piece of eye candy; his Vanity Fair survives due to its
power as social reportage and portraiture, and also, probably,
his winking narrative voice. The novel ends thusly: "Ah!
Vanitas Vanitatum! which of us is happy in this world?
Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied? -- come,
children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play
is played out." Well, how do you end a Reese Witherspoon
movie on that note?
One character in the movie
Vanity Fair is allowed Thackerayan qualities -- the Marquess
of Steyne, played by Gabriel Byrne with such glowering, mordant
disdain for the hollow society he was born into that Byrne almost
seems to be speaking for the author. And the Marquess does get
to ask, perhaps rhetorically, "Which of us is happy in this
world?" Nobody, really, except Becky Sharp (Witherspoon),
whose up-and-down navigation of the social ladder is the movie's
chief focus. One needs a scorecard to keep track of Becky's various
conquests, not to mention the people who function as satellites
around her sphere; the script scarcely bothers to fill in the
blanks, and late in the game we receive one of those forlorn
titles, "12 Years Later -- In Germany." Germany?
Twelve years later? Huh? Shouldn't Reese at least have a few
extra wrinkles?
The Witherspoon of perhaps
eight years ago -- she who enthusiastically headlined such confrontational
indies as Freeway
and Election
-- could easily have handled a Vanity Fair true to Thackeray.
But here we have the post-Legally Blonde Reese, who appears
to have airbrushed any flint or perversity out of her official
Hollywood head shot. Her Becky is charming enough, and easy on
the eyes while draped in Beatrix Aruna Pasztor's elegant costumes.
But the Becky of this movie is a good-hearted blank who pits
herself against the snobs and wins, to the supposed delight of
the audience, when the moral should be more like the computer's
dictum in WarGames: "The only winning move is not
to play." (Yes, I enjoy being perhaps the only Vanity
Fair reviewer to reference WarGames.)
The director Mira Nair has
run hot and cold with me; I enjoyed her Mississippi Masala,
hooted at her Kama
Sutra, and missed her Monsoon Wedding and
Hysterical Blindness (for HBO). Much has been made of
the factoid that both Nair and Thackeray were born in India,
and the film does wake up belatedly when some belly dancers (led
by our Reese) take the stage -- although no movie should be allowed
to get to the hour-and-forty-five-minute mark and then have a
character announce "The entertainment is about to begin,"
which begs the question of where it's been hiding for the last
105 minutes. Anyway, Vanity Fair has about as much to
do with India as Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle
does, and Nair just doesn't have the temperament to tell a story
in which her heroine's ambitions are rendered hollow. She's very
much into the whole grrl-power Bend It Like Beckham thing,
which is nice but not Thackeray, who was not nice.
Anyone nursing a sore butt
from Vanity Fair would do well to go back to 1975 via
DVD time-travel and look up Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon,
also from a Thackeray novel; Kubrick decidedly shared Thackeray's
acidic point of view. Regarded at the time as an overdesigned
yawner, it holds up today as an elaborate joke -- a three-hour
epic with a completely useless non-hero at its center. Lest I
sound sexist, I would nominate Lina Wertmuller -- whose Seven
Beauties remains, for me, the greatest film ever crafted
by feminine hands -- as a director whose vision would have coexisted
peacefully with Thackeray's. As it is, the Vanity Fair
we have received is merely the Oscar bait of the moment, ending
not with doubts about attaining desire but with an image of Reese
Witherspoon astride a happy elephant. Yay! England sucks and
India is cool! Well, except for that troublesome caste system,
of course.
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