Vanity Fair Review
by Laura Clifford (laura AT reelingreviews DOT com)September 7th, 2004
VANITY FAIR
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Becky Sharp (Reese Witherspoon, "Legally Blonde 2, Red, White and Blonde") and Amelia Sedley (Romola Garai, "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights") leave Miss Pinkerton's School for Girls as an orphan and a cosseted young woman of means, but the best friends will see their fortunes reversed in "Vanity Fair."
You can take the director out of India, but...Mira Nair gives William Makepeace Thackeray's Napoleonic War era satire the Bollywood treatment with a good dose of "Gone With the Wind" thrown in for good measure. While the film looks gorgeous and Reese Witherspoon is quite fetching as the gold digging Becky, the film demands too many abrupt about-faces for characters who are given episodic screen time to make epic evolutions.
Becky is introduced as a scruffy urchin putting on a marionette show that foreshadows her own future. The young girl assures her own downfall when she demands ten guineas for her father's portrait of her deceased mother, her own sentimentality priced right. The man who buys the painting will meet Becky much later in life and repeat the transaction on a much grander scale.
Nair and her screenwriters, Matthew Faulk and "Gosford Park's" Julian Fellowes, in adapting a book subtitled 'a novel without a hero,' warm their heroine's cold heart, making her subsequent downfall seem rather harsh. Also muddled is the character of George Osborne (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, sinking back to villainy after his lovely good guy turn in "Bend It Like Beckham"), whose motivations for marrying Amelia are botched by the filmmakers - is it Dobbin's (an affecting Rhys Ifans, "Danny Deckchair") impassioned cry for decency, a rebellious act against his father or a true change of heart? The latter explanation is immediately dashed by his despicable behavior towards his pregnant wife and poor Romola Garai is left playing an Amelia who is an unpleasant mix of stupidity, loyalty and selfishness. Particularly affected by the film's jumps in time is the character of Rawdon Crawley (played by "Resident Evil's" James Purefoy in perhaps the film's best performance), whose exit from Becky's life is sudden when weighed against all that has come before it (Nair's staging of this scene simply screams of Rhett Butler's famous departure, just as the flight from Brussels strongly smacks of the fleeing of Atlanta. Later, Rawdon's sister-in-law becomes his Melanie). "Vanity Fair's" conclusion is sure to offend purists and begins to reek of its director's determination to stamp her heritage upon her film wherever possible.
Nevertheless, "Vanity Fair" is an entertaining enough bauble, with its lush art direction (Sam Stokes and Lucinda Thomson) and sumptuous costumes (Beatrix Aruna Pasztor, "In the Cut"). A huge cast of name actors like Gabriel Byrne ("Spider"), Bob Hoskins ("Maid In Manhattan"), Geraldine McEwan ("The Magdalene Sisters") and the ubiquitous Jim Broadbent, "Around the World in 80 Days") dress up the cast with their presences, but only "Cold Mountain's Eileen Atkins scores strongly as the controlling Aunt Tilly.
C+
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