*** (out of ****)
Starring Reese Witherspoon, Eileen Atkins, Jim Broadbent, Gabriel Byrne, Romola Garai, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Bob Hoskins, Rhys Ifans, and James Purefoy
Directed by Mira Nair & written for the screen by Julian Fellowes, Matthew Faulk, and Mark Skeet, from the novel by William Makepeace Thackeray
2004
141 min PG13
My only complaint about this colorful and lively adaptation of William Thackeray is that, even at 2 ½ hours, it’s too short! I wanted the same cast, the same director, and the same look. But I wanted another forty or sixty more minutes of it. Maybe even the length of some kind of “Masterpiece Theatre” thing. Relationships feel a bit truncated and scenes intended as emotional payoffs haven’t had quite the necessary build up. We hear about a couple of weddings but, in the script by Julian Fellowes (Oscar winner for “Gosford Park”) don’t see any of them. Stanley Kubrick’s wizardly Thackeray adaptation “Barry Lyndon” clocks in 42 minutes longer and is also, incidentally, the most director-ly movie I’ve ever seen. But “Vanity Fair” is still a splendid film and, incidentally, probably more accessible if you’re like Pauline Kael and found “Barry Lyndon” “an ice-pack of a movie, a masterpiece in every insignificant detail.”
Part of that accessibility comes from director Mira Nair’s attempts at bringing out all that is prescient in the story, and Thackeray’s biting vision of the greed and dread of poverty lurking behind and motivating everything beautiful is as contemporary as ever. It’s the early 1800s, when the bourgeoisie were buying their way into the oligarchy in earnest, and the aristocrats were fighting it tooth and nail. But Thackeray is unimpressed: as far as he’s concerned, capitalists and feudalists are both shallow and greedy, and what comes across is how quickly the formerly poor become just as mean as the long rich.
In basic outline, “Vanity Fair” moves “Barry Lyndon” up by a century and changes the protagonist’s gender: Becky Sharp (Reese Witherspoon) is born low but determined to end high. She and her girlhood chum (Romola Garai) try to both marry for love and money, but only end up with love, and their lives are contrasted as the years go by. Becky ends up with a gambler (James Purefoy) whose choice of a governess for a wife incurs the wrath of his in-laws, while the officer (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) destined for Becky’s friend is put upon by his merchant father (Jim Broadbent) to marry better. The difference between the two women is that the chum is all-good, while Becky is more of a moral relativist.
All this is overseen by a figure from Becky’s past, who ends up as her neighbor. He’s a marquis (Gabriel Byrne) who knows how everything works and takes cruel pleasure in pointing it out. If you’re wondering what’s the point of that big Indian-inspired dance scene in the middle, that’s what’s going on. The great Bob Hoskins also shows up to play Becky’s first boss, a man noble in title but in nothing else, complete with old, frayed wigs, and Eileen Atkins plays a mean-spirited aunt who talks democracy but ends up in defense of the aristocracy. Like all empire-waisted, who-marries-whom, sarcastic-remarks-in-drawing rooms movies, “Vanity Fair” isn’t a romance at all but a conflict of ideologies, and ideology tends, in Thackeray, to be a pleasure of wealth.
If you’ve recognized the actors so far, you know this is a terrific supporting cast, with credits that include “Topsy Turvy,” “Vera Drake,” “The Usual Suspects,” “Little Women,” “Titus,” “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” “Bend It Like Beckham,” “Nicholas Nickleby,” and “I Capture the Castle.” But you may be concerned with chirpy American Reese Witherspoon in the lead. Don’t be. She brings cunning and vulnerability to the role, so we can follow her when she is both mercenary in her intentions but ultimately too good-hearted to follow through with those intentions.
Mira Nair (“Monsoon Wedding”) brings new colors to an empire waist period picture, not just in the costumes and scenery, but in the servant-clad Indians and Africans watching with vaguely knowing eyes from the edges of the frame. All the riches that are propelling the merchants into the aristocracy, and therefore the movie itself, have come from the colonies after all, and there’s something fitting in having an Indian director. “Vanity Fair” is the kind of movie thirty or forty years ago used to get a half-dozen Oscar nominations, but a few years ago became the nearly-exclusive domain of two guys named Merchant and Ivory. Nair and the “Vanity Fair” crew tried to break the genre into the multiplex and didn’t succeed, which is too bad. It’s not the best movie you’ll ever see, but it’s pretty good.
Finished Sunday, Oscar Night, February 27th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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