Vanity Fair, Mira Nair’s adaptation of Thackeray’s novel, is something of a mess. I like Nair’s work, and absolutely adore her Monsoon Wedding, but it appears that she is swamped by the source material here, Thackeray’s massive tome. At first, Vanity Fair appears to dodge that bullet, as the film quickly finds its feet, with the first 40 minutes or so a delightful series of bon mots and witty repartee that hints at the film’s underlying gentle Austen-ian social satire.
Indeed, Becky Sharp (Reese Witherspoon) seems to be just the sort of heroine that Jane Austen built her career around – a young woman of substance and intelligence but no means, who determines early on that life is a game of chance, and that she has little to lose in her gamble to gain entry into the world of high society. However, Vanity Fair quickly uses up every bit of goodwill it built up to this point when something dreadful happens. The plot (should I say plotsss) rears its ugly head, and the rest of the film is spent trying furiously to juggle the chainsaws that are the film’s array of characters and their myriad storylines. Actually, it’s nothing quite so gory as that, but rather more like watching a plate-spinning novelty act, and noticing that, once the plates have been set a-whirling, there is some innate flaw in the china, and cringing as the performer tries futilely to keep ‘em all aloft. Alas and similarly, the centre of Vanity Fair cannot hold, and the whole thing comes crashing down around us all as Nair scrambles to make something watchable out of it all. Simply put, the social critique gets drenched in the narrative tide. Vanity Fair tries to keep track of at least a dozen characters whose lives are woven together in a half-dozen different storylines, and as a result is unable to devote the sort of time and energy necessary to keep us emotionally or mentally engaged in any of them. As much as I was pleasantly surprised by the performance of Rhys Ifans as Dobbin, Nair would have done well to excise the peripheral threads, such as that of Amelia (Romola Garai, who perhaps not-so-coincidentally played Kate in Nicholas Nickleby) and her sad sack Sedley family.
Also contributing to the film’s problems is the always-cute Reese Witherspoon, who chooses to smooth over the sharp edges of the story’s heroine, Becky Sharp, making her too much Elle (Legally Blonde) and not enough Tracy Flick (Election). On the other hand, the film’s production values are first-rate, and there is little to fault in Vanity Fair‘s look and feel. Likewise, outside of Witherspoon, the performances are generally solid – even if most of the characters remain, due to the script’s lack of focus, dreadfully underwritten. The solid supporting cast includes Bob Hoskins, Jim Broadbent and Gabriel Byrne, the last of whom is at his cruellest, playing Lord Stayne, an admirer of art and the acquisitive sort who will not be satisfied until he adds Becky to his many collections. However, the gem of this ensemble is Dame Eileen Atkins, quite at home as the acerbic Aunt Tilly, who has the knack of seeing through others’ bluster and calling everyone’s bluff, except her own. Alas, she disappears from the screen too soon.
It’s telling that a story that aims to expose the banal reality behind the grande facade of high society, and crack the thin genetic veneer stretched across a large economic and moral abyss, itself proves to have no depth. Vanity Fair is a disappointingly shallow pool.
