REVIEWED: VANITY FAIR
Critics have been describing the chief protagonist of W. M. Thackeray's 1848 novel Vanity Fair as disarmingly modern for so long that Becky Sharp must surely have reverted to being old-fashioned again. Certainly her callous pragmatism seems a little too much for Reese Witherspoon (on paper an excellent choice for the role), who dulls the character's edges so much in Mira Nair's sumptuous, ultimately rather silly adaptation that Becky ends up being little more frightening than that idiot Witherspoon played in Legally Blonde.
To be fair, the film's first half, following Becky's early years, first as governess in a decaying rural pile and then wife to a disinherited officer, is carried off well enough. The effortlessly charming Romola Garai, still searching for the role that will surely propel her career into the stratosphere, does what she can with Becky's drippy friend Amelia Sedley, and Eileen Atkins, often a better Maggie Smith than Maggie Smith, is tremendous as the hypocritical spinster who, despite her claims to being a free thinker, turns on the impoverished governess when she takes up with the old lady's nephew.
But the events following the Battle of Waterloo - related in the novel's sourest chapters - prove too complex and too disconnected for Nair and her fellow scriptwriters (among them Gosford Park's Julian Fellowes) to make sense of. Becky returns to London and shames herself with Gabriel Byrne's sinister aristocrat to enable an unsatisfying progress through London society. Amelia mourns the death of her soldier husband (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers with boyband hair) in a shed by the river. Deprived of focus or direction, the film flails aimlessly towards the most unsatisfactorily compromised ending of a literary adaptation since Stephen Fry tidied Waugh's Vile Bodies into Bright Young Things.
And what in the name of heaven does the film look like? Nair, the Indian director of Salaam Bombay! and Monsoon Wedding, noting that Thackeray was born in Calcutta and that the book is full of references to the subcontinent, has decorated the enterprise with any number of preposterous flourishes from her homeland. Graduate students of Post-Colonial Claptrap may enjoy furrowing their brows at the silks and robes and parrots, but even they will surely find Witherspoon's brief sub-Bhangra jitterbug incongruous to the point of lunacy.
