The Unseen Movie Review

Vanity Fair

Long before “Vanity Fair” was the name for the world’s glossiest celebrity magazine it was one of the most bitingly satirical novels ever written – a brilliant demolition of early nineteenth century society. If the magazine of the same name was anywhere near as critical of the people who feature within its covers as William Makepeace Thackeray was of his characters it would have been bankrupted through lawsuits decades ago.

The last major big-screen outing for a Thackeray novel was Stanley Kubrick’s often under-appreciated 1975 adaptation, Barry Lyndon, in which the master director decided to abandon much of the novel’s plot and characterisation in favour of a lush visual experiment. It’s an incredible film, but hardly very faithful to the book.

Vanity Fair is an immensely broad, lengthy, amusing, insightful and complex novel with a strong central narrative based around the formidable social climber that is Becky Sharp - one of the most interesting and complicated heroines in literature. It should be ideal movie material – assuming the normal pitfalls of literary adaptation are avoided and a skilled screenwriter and director are put in charge, and assuming that they, unlike Kubrick, stick to the material.

The director assigned the task of bringing this classic to the cinema is the supremely talented Indian all-rounder Mira Nair, responsible for 2001’s surprise hit Monsoon Wedding – an examination of prejudice with much in common with Thackeray’s tale from a century and a half earlier. The original screenplay, by a couple of relative unknowns, has been given a hefty polish by Julian Fellowes, the Oscar-winning scribe behind the wonderful examination of class relations that was Gosford Park. If anyone could condense the novel for the screen, you’d imagine this pair would have a good chance.

When the casting was announced there was initially also much to raise hopes. The original novel is inundated with great characters, and the casting department for the movie seemed to have scoured high and low for some of the best character actors in the business – Bob Hoskins, Rhys Ifans and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers among them.

But the key to this quintessentially British tale was always going to be the shrewdly manipulative Becky Sharpe. So why did they pick American Reese Witherspoon, best known for her ditzy blondes in the likes of Cruel Intentions and Legally Blonde? Despite her best efforts to cope with a UK accent in one of her most challenging roles to date, she just can’t quite bring the character believably to life.

This isn’t the only problem. Director Nair, for some reason not content with the ability to exploit Thackeray’s immense imagination, bizarrely opts to include a couple of almost Bollywood-style production numbers, and reduces a number of key characters to minor roles, despite them being played by some of the best talent in the film.

Yet despite the diminishment of the central character and the director’s tendency to go off on tangents, this is nonetheless a far more appealing film than might be feared. Just enough of Thackeray remains to give a hint at the complexity of the world he created. It certainly would have been nicer if more of the original could have been retained – and if the film could have been made to look rather more like Thackeray’s own illustrations – but for those who have never read it this will still act as an ideal introduction to one of the greatest English novels ever written.

posted by Nosemonkey @ 12:00 AM