Vanity Fair - La foire aux vanités

"Vanity Fair" (2004) is an acceptable but abbreviated version of the classic Thackery Victorian period novel which tells of Becky Sharp (Witherspoon), who uses artifice and charm to climb from lowly governess to aristocrat, always able to find a suitable family of peerage or property to use as a rung in her ladder to the top in spite of the tribulations of the time. At just over two hours, this film cannot deal in depth with the many characters in the story and has to content itself with hitting the high points which make for a very condensed telling suited to those who only wish the flavor of the story. Those with a particular interest in Victorian pulp fiction or more expansive dramas should turn to the BBC's 1998 six hour miniseries which offers greater character depth, a presentation much more true to the period, and a very much better cast. (B-)

William Makepeace Thackeray's novel "Vanity Fair" is a satire telling of the rise, fall and rise again of the social-climbing adventuress Becky Sharp. Like a number of other literary heroines from this period, most notably Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Becky starts life as a governess, although she and Jane Eyre are completely different in character. Whereas Jane is morally upright and deeply religious, Becky is scheming and unscrupulous. (Her surname has an obvious symbolic meaning). She marries Rawdon Crawley, an Army officer and the younger son of her employer, becomes the mistress of the wealthy Lord Steyne and, after various reverses of fortune, ends up as the wife of a senior official with the East India Company.

Thackeray's title is taken from Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" and refers to a fair which was intended to symbolise man's sinful attachment to the things of this world. His intention was to satirise the snobbishness, hypocrisy and worldliness of British society. Although the events described in the novel take place in the 1810s and 1820s, two or three decades before it was published in 1848, he clearly intended it to have a contemporary relevance, and his readers would have had no difficulty identifying the Becky Sharps and Lord Steynes of their own day.

The author described it as a "novel without a hero", and few, if any, of its characters are intended to come across as sympathetic. We may admire Becky's cunning and determination, but her ruthlessness and amorality mark her out as the novel's anti-heroine rather than its heroine. Her husband Rawdon is as amoral as her, and considerably more stupid. Steyne (pronounced "stain"- another symbolic name) is a libertine and a bully. Rawdon's father Sir Pitt Crawley is an oafish vulgarian and his brother Pitt junior a pompous prig. Becky's friend Amelia Sedley is, unlike Becky herself, morally upright, but is also rather dull, lacking in intelligence and a poor judge of character. She persists, for example, in believing, in the teeth of all the evidence, that her rakish fiancé George Osborne, who later becomes her husband, is a paragon of virtue.

The novel has been the subject of numerous television and film adaptations, although this is the only one I have seen apart from the British television version from the late eighties. That adaptation kept to Thackeray's plot reasonably faithfully, but scriptwriter Julian Fellowes and director Mira Nair evidently thought that that plot would not work on the big screen because they made a number of changes, most notably to the character of Becky, who becomes far more sympathetic than she was in the original. (There was, apparently, an earlier discarded screenplay in which Becky's character was closer to the way she is depicted in the novel). The character of her husband Rawdon is also somewhat sanitised, and even Steyne at first seems more like a kindly benefactor than a sexual predator. It is only at the end that he reveals himself in his true colours.

No film based upon a novel, especially a novel as complex as "Vanity Fair", can ever be 100% faithful to the original, and a number of literary adaptations have been highly successful films in their own right despite departing considerably from their source material. This, however, is not really one of them. If you want to make a film about a feisty young proto-feminist in the Regency era- which is how Fellowes paints Becky- I would not really recommend using Thackeray's novel as a starting-point. Deprived of much of its satirical content, "Vanity Fair" becomes emasculated, just another "heritage cinema" British costume drama.

Yet this is not entirely a bad film. Reese Witherspoon makes Becky into an appealing heroine, and cannot be held personally to blame for the fact that the character she is playing is far from being the one that Thackeray created. Her British accent is perhaps not 100% reliable, but this is not so important in period drama, as we do not know exactly how people spoke in the early nineteenth-century, and the difference between British and American accents may have been less marked than it is today. There are also some good performances in cameo roles from the likes of Bob Hoskins as the uncouth Sir Pitt and Eileen Atkins as his wealthy and autocratic sister Miss Matilda.

Another attractive feature is the visual look of the film. Nair was clearly aiming to reproduce the look of an Old Master painting, and does this by the use of strong, vivid colours, especially reds and greens, shot through a filter which gives a slightly yellow tint, like a picture seem through a protective layer of varnish. I felt, however, that this is a film which could have been improved had it followed the original novel more closely. 6/10

I had the somewhat unfortunate job of accompanying two teenage girls to my viewing of Vanity Fair. As any cinema attendee will know, there is nothing more irritating then two talkative teens, with the attention span of goldfish, chatting throughout the entire film. All their interest was well gone by the time Gabriel Byrne strutted onto the screen, and although it pains me to admit it, my interest had slowly subsided with theirs.

Although beautiful shots, skillful performances and magnificently designed sets came bountiful, there was still one vast absence that was so dearly missed. This was the charm, the charisma and the fascination that connects the audience with the characters. The scenes didn't fuse well and felt shabbily thrown together. Acknowledged events came as surprises and characters lost their appeal and distinctiveness. Becky Sharp, played by Reese Witherspoon, became aggravating and tedious, and any sympathy, understanding or patience for that matter, was lost to a plot so drawn and witless, it made 'Charlie's angels' seem thought provoking.

The charm and the magic of the William Makepeace Thackeray novel were forgotten in this drawn and soulless remake of a classic. Worth the watch for the costumes and set alone, but expect nothing more.

This is an entertaining movie that goes over two hours, but I really don't understand why it was made. Sprawling stories spanning several decades with several subplots involving dozens of characters are totally defensible on the printed page, where we can always go back and remind ourselves which character is which and how this character is related to that one. But this type of thing makes no sense whatsoever in a film. Unless a viewer has a phenomenal memory, such a story on film invariably leads to confusion and to my asking myself, "now wait a minute, whose brother is this, and whose son?"

So that is one of the principal problems with this film.

There are several other problems as well. Reese Witherspoon is badly miscast. She simply lacks Becky Sharp's bite. In fact, the whole film lacks Thackeray's bite. Reese does a good job with the British accent, but it just doesn't work. She is just too American for the role. Weren't there any British actresses available, or were the producers just relying on Reese's star power? Reese is just too nice to play Becky.

It has often been said that Becky Sharp was the model for Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone With the Wind," although Margaret Mitchell denied this. Even so, I kept visualizing Vivien Leigh in this role and imagining how perfect she would have been. I think Mira Nair was thinking of GWTW as well, because there are several scenes in the film that are obvious homages to it. First there are the battle scenes during the Battle of Waterloo, followed by a panoramic view of the carnage following the battle, complete with corpses strewn all over the battlefield. This was an obvious homage to the crane shot over Atlanta in GWTW. The final fight between Becky and her husband reminded me of the final fight between Scarlett and Rhett in GWTW. I half expected the husband to say "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

Another flaw involves the Indian director Nair's inability to resist bringing in some Bollywood type scenes, particularly one involving Becky leading an Indian type dance, with Indian music, before the king, no less, and to thunderous applause.

And yet another thing: this film spans at least twenty, maybe twenty-five or thirty, years in Becky's life after she graduates from finishing school--I am not counting the one scene of her as a child--yet the character never ages. Neither do any of the other characters. Maybe the makeup staff went on strike?

But most of these problems won't even be noted by someone who hasn't read the book, so if you haven't, go ahead and see it; you'll probably be entertained. And if you are someone like me who loves the book, you may not be able to resist seeing it anyway. But Thackeray was never so soft.

Believe it or not, I am under the age of 20 and have read this novel purely out of interest and found it to be an amazing piece of work. Thackeray's unique writing style in "Vanity Fair" is captivating. I saw the movie only a week after finishing the book, with the details fresh in my mind, to be immensely displeased. I have read a number of excellent comments that go into detail of the faults of the movie, so I plan to keep this brief for those wanting a shorter critique.

At least half of the characters were misrepresented. I believe the only two relatively-accurate main characters were Jos Sedley and Rawdon Crawley. Becky was completely dismantled into something with scarcely a semblance of what she is portrayed as in the book. The character Dobbin was undefined; George Osborne was snobbish instead of cocky; his rigid father suddenly became sympathetic (way too early and much too far); not to mention troves of other discrepancies. I understand the goal may have been to come up with a more abridged version, but there were changes made that had nothing to do with shortening the screenplay. Besides, there were a number of musical pieces that could have been cut in order to use the time more beneficially by preserving some of the integrity of the film.

Thackeray would have been appalled at this hack job.

Were it not for my love for time period films, and the possibility of enjoying this movie as something very separate from the book, I would not care to see it again. At least the filming was impressive, though that hardly makes up for the rest. The theatrical trailer is the best part of the movie.