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A flat sharp
National Review, Sept 27, 2004 by Jonathan Foreman
THE rollicking new film adaptation of Vanity Fair has many pleasures, despite the filmmakers' infidelity to the book's satirical tone and a foolish decision to recast Thackeray's fascinating, delightfully vicious anti-heroine Becky Sharp as a mere victim of the mores of her time. These pleasures include amusing performances by Reese Witherspoon and some fine British actors, some enjoyably snarky comic dialogue, attractive locations in England and India, and an understanding that early-19th-century England was more racially diverse than most people think.
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All this makes it even more of a shame that the filmmakers felt compelled to sentimentalize and indeed neuter the novel's central character. Perhaps they felt they couldn't pull off Thackeray's wonderful balancing act: His Becky is both a heartless monster and a victim of circumstance. She embodies the spirit of her age, and her victims largely deserve her pitiless exploitation of their follies and weaknesses. Even today Vanity Fair is a hilarious read, bracing in its robust cynicism about the manners and morals of a peacock Regency world that had not yet submitted to the black-coated rigors of Victorian moralism. Thackeray's characters inhabit a society that had not fully settled on the code of a gentleman--defined by behavior as much as birth--as a way to allocate status and respectability, and whose hierarchies had been undermined by vast new fortunes rapidly made and as rapidly lost.
Director Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding) and her lead screenwriter Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park) take relatively few liberties with the novel's basic plot. Becky (Reese Witherspoon) is still the orphaned daughter of a profligate artist and a French opera girl, still sent off to study and teach at a Ladies' finishing school, and still doomed to the genteel half-life of a governess unless she can use her looks, accomplishments, and wiles to land herself a husband.
Her best friend, Amelia (Romola Garai), is still a constantly weeping simp, in love with the arrogant social-climbing army officer Osborne (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), and blind to the adoration of gawky but noble Dobbin (Rhys Ifans). And Becky's social ascent remains much as it was in the book, at least until her marriage to handsome gambler and Guards officer Rawdon (James Purefoy). Thereafter, Becky's flirtations and affairs are made much more innocent than in the novel. (Her only moral weakness here is a lack of maternal passion.) And by the end of the film's second act she is depicted as positively naive: Her life seems to be a series of betrayals by initially helpful and attractive aristocratic mentors. When cynical Lord Steyne (here no aging homunculus but handsome Gabriel Byrne) who has promoted Becky's rise in society and paid off her crushing debts, finally insists on payment in kind, Becky is both shocked and adamant in her refusal! At this point the film ceases to make either dramatic or satirical sense.
Lovers of the novel will be disappointed by the loss of much of its dry humor. Nair and Fellowes have dropped the knowing narration that gives the novel much of its satirical bite. It may be that Thackeray's pleasurable disgust at Regency society's vain cruelties was either too affectionate or too nuanced for the filmmakers to reproduce with conviction; at any rate they clearly felt obliged to impose on Thackeray's tale a crude and much less interesting modern feminist theme.
There are moments when Nair seems to be on an unworthy double mission. First, she strains to show 19th-century England as much uglier and more drab than audiences used to Merchant-Ivory might expect; second, she trumpets a liberated, "post-colonial" lack of respect for--or even understanding of--a dead white male's English classic, as if Thackeray's perspective on his society were somehow inevitably, cripplingly narrow or politically naive. Given that the film's titles include a dedication to the late Edward Said, of Orientalism notoriety, perhaps one ought to be grateful that the film's Indian sequences don't show lashed coolies bleeding to produce England's enormous new wealth; instead, the film's "exotic" Indian scenes could come right out of tourist brochures and J. Peterman-style safari catalogues, with red, rugged Rajasthani forts under piercing blue skies, dancing peasants, swaying elephants, and dashing men in riding boots.
Another of the film's pleasures turns out to be its (slightly heavy-handed) emphasis on how much Regency England was fascinated by all things Oriental--a fascination shared and also deplored by Calcutta-born Thackeray. This was a time when "going native" was almost the norm for the Britons who went out to India. The film includes a scene in the book in which Jos Sedley, on leave from his job in Boggley Wollah, insists on being served the Indian food he has come to love.
There is also much to be said for the colorful and courageous manner (with hints of Bollywood) in which Nair uses music in this film, taking genuine pleasure in the way this pre-gramophone society valued music and song. Rather than telling you that Becky Sharp has a great voice and that musical accomplishments are a powerful social weapon, Nair takes the risk of stopping the action while Becky sings entire songs to dumbstruck drawing rooms. It works: Witherspoon (or whoever performs her songs) sings beautifully, notably a lovely setting of Byron's "She Walks In Beauty."
