Trust me, I'd be the last person in the world to argue that a filmmaker should, or even could, slavishly reproduce a novel on screen. Can't be done.
The effect of words on a page is savored alone, in the privacy of one's own heart and mind's-eye. The cinematic art comprises visual images and spoken dialogue collaboratively shaped by numerous craftsmen for communal pleasure.
So my quarrel with Mira Nair's sumptuous version of William Makepeace Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" can't be shorthanded into a book-lover's whine of betrayal. The movie has little to do, in any real sense, with Thackeray's Victorian vision.
The director of "Monsoon Wedding" and "Mississippi Masala" almost entirely omits the tough muscle and sinew of Thackeray's savagely satire of British class warfare, opting instead for soft, safe fantasy.
Nair's "Vanity Fair" is less Thackeray's brutal power play than a magic carpet, patterned with pretty pictures of attractive folks playing delicious dress-up in a place and time that never were.
When Nair stages a highly sensual nautch dance - starring respectable Victorian matrons in considerable deshabille - for the leering edification of royalty and aristos, the sexy costumes, moves and music may tickle the cinematic palate of a modern-day audience. But let's be clear: a society that, at least on its face, could not countenance uttering the words "legs" or "limbs" in a lady's presence would hardly have sat still for it.
Reese Witherspoon's too modern and too cute by half to play the cunning Becky Sharp. Beautiful, sharp as a tack, Thackeray's Becky is an evolutionary leap in a species of socio-economic Neanderthals. It's in the nature of this voracious creature stuck at the bottom of the Victorian social order to rise, to kill in order to satisfy her appetite.
"Vanity Fair"'s not an 18th-century version of "The Apprentice": getting fired from Thackeray's upscale company meant instant, flesh-and-blood ruin. In contrast, aside from occasional dishevelment of coiffure and costume, Nair's Becky slips from golden parachute to golden parachute, until she finally lands in a well-appointed howdah by the side of her first and last marital mark.
In Nair's movie, Becky barely registers as a ruthless golddigger. Naïve, in love, a loyal friend, she's all golden girl, sans a functioning darkside. Even her flirtation with the fabulously wealthy Lord Steyne (Gabriel Byrne) seems accidental rather than premeditated.
Witherspoon plays the affair as though his Mephistophelean patronage doesn't entail payback, as though cuteness always trumps evil designs. Though her soft-hearted husband (a very dashing James Purefoy) is shown slinking melodramatically around the periphery of her trysts with Steyne, Becky treats his ultimate Rhett Butler exit as something of an overreaction.
By means of one brief scene and a conversational aside, hubby's killed off; years afterwards a cheerful Becky, in appearance not a day older, is hanging out with a span of Boy George types in some Continental dive. Where, I ask you, is the angst, the retribution for a misguided life? Not in this movie, where even bad things lack edge.
Nair must be complimented for evoking the peculiar manner in which time moves and lives alter in the Victorian novel. Like intricate clockwork, one experience elides swiftly into the next, fateful decisions that affected parties are never to know of occur offstage, dinners and parties dictate destiny - and the complex machinery of class and power never shuts down.
The adorable Witherspoon can't aspire to the catlike charm of Miriam Hopkins, whose Becky Sharp in the 1934 movie of that name was a creature whose smiles had teeth behind them. But the cast of the 2004 "Vanity Fair" also features Bob Hoskins, Eileen Atkins, Rhys Ifans, Jim Broadbent, Geradine McEwan and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, who deliver sentimental or darkly funny performances that recall the richly emblematic character-acting that graced old Hollywood movie adaptations of British novels.
And there's one moment in Nair's "Vanity Fair" I won't soon forget: upstart Becky singing Tennyson's exquisitely melancholy "Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal" to a roomful of overdressed and cosmeticized snobs, bringing to tears ladies bought and sold on the money/marriage market. Here's the terrible sadness of youth and beauty as fragile commodities in a consumerist society.
For film art that never falls from that level of emotional authenticity, I urge you to rent Terence Davies' "House of Mirth" (2000), a flawless adaptation of Edith Wharton's great novel. As doomed Lily Bart, the red-haired heroine of this American "Vanity Fair," Gillian Anderson is nothing short of dazzling in her pilgrim's progress. Tennyson's poem will always belong to her.
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