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It’s common knowledge that movies are never better than the books upon which they are based. Never has that been truer than with Mira Nair’s film adaptation of Vanity Fair. This film is a flawed attempt to pack 800 pages of dense, eighteenth-century novel into 90 minutes of screen time. The result is exactly what you’d expect: a choppy, poorly paced film that is ultimately a disappointment. Vanity Fair is a classic eighteenth-century British novel by William Makepeace Thackeray about the lengths that his contemporaries were willing to go to improve their station in society. His lead is Becky Sharp (Reese Witherspoon), a maid and governess who is born of scandal-ridden parentage and who tries to climb the ranks of British society through a well-chosen marriage and calculated manipulation. The problem is that Nair’s source material is so long that, in order to keep the film a tolerable length, Nair only kept Thackeray’s juiciest, most dramatic bits, lending the production a more melodramatic air that it should have. Because of Nair’s incessant cutting, Vanity Fair’s plot becomes somewhat disjointed and unclear. Helping nothing is the fact that the story spans several decades, locations and a multitude of characters and subplots. Never lingering on any one element of the script for very long (the supporting characters have such little screen time that it became difficult to keep them all straight), Vanity Fair has the unwanted and off-putting feeling of being rushed. It is consequently quite difficult to become engrossed in the film’s characters or the twists and turns of the plot.  The other issue of notoriety in Vanity Fair came with Nair’s decision to transform Witherspoon’s Becky Sharp from one of British literature’s most infamous and ruthless villainesses, into an eighteenth-century version of Legally Blonde’s Elle Woods. Instead of being the backstabbing and coldly ambitious character Thackeray created, Sharp becomes another typical Witherspoon character; a cheeky and warmly determined woman who finds it necessary to overcome severe odds on her way to the top. At times, Witherspoon delivered her lines so sweetly and naively that it is unclear if Becky is the personification of evil or if she has suitably good intentions towards others. Thackeray’s Becky had none of this ambiguity, which made her a much more interesting and compelling lead. Frankly, it’s amazing to consider that Nair didn’t notice this. Vanity Fair is not a bad movie, it is just poorly constructed, falling prey to every possible trapping of the genre. After past disjointed attempts to adapt classic novels for the screen, such as Les Misérables, Mary Reilly and Jane Eyre, you’d think that Nair might have learned a trick or two about what not to do. Judging from the final cut of this film, she didn’t.
emily riemer yes, it's true: Reese is not actress Reese Witherspoon's real first name, or even her first middle name (which is Jean). Reese is her second middle name. |
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