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Vanity
Fair
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I must have been sitting near a book-group during Vanity Fair, because every forced moment of plot explication or obviously tacked-on bit of business was greeted by this pocket of the audience with knowing snorts of derision and much instant, whispered analysis. As one who has not read William Makepeace Thackeray's novel, I found myself in an even less pleasurable position. Mira Nair's film is one of those unwieldy adaptations which sails along in a vacuum. It is like an inscrutable, old narrative painting missing its accompanying, hefty caption. Only a thorough, prior knowledge of the book would make sense of some of its characters and their actions. Becky Sharp (Reese Witherspoon) is, as one Internet site refers to her, "a cold and calculating social climber". Or is she? Nair loads this grand family melodrama with the full weight of her oft-displayed political correctness. The result is confusing: Becky is, by turns, a schemer, a victim, an innocent and a survivor. Witherspoon is cleverly cast and gives the role her best shot, but she cannot bring any clarity to Nair's wishy-washy conception of the character. We watch Becky's ascent from poverty to affluence, from teaching children in the rundown home of Sir Pitt Crawley (Bob Hoskins) to dodging the favours expected of her as a result of financial aid supplied by the creepy Marquess of Steyne (Gabriel Byrne). Along the way there is the birth of love with Rawdon (James Purefoy) and the fraying of friendship with Amelia (Romola Garai from Dirty Dancing 2 [2004]). But Becky's true feelings, at any and every point, remain bewilderingly opaque. Nair has compared this project to her previous and best film, Monsoon Wedding (2001), saying that she wished to recapture the same vibrancy created by having a large number of central characters whose plot lines are always dynamically overlapping. This is wishful thinking on her part (despite the wise choice of Gosford Park [2001] screenwriter Julian Fellowes), because most of the time the various strands of Vanity Fair remain ploddingly separate. This leads to odd ellipses for the sake of hurrying things along; we seem to see only the start and end of every friendship or love affair, not the scenes that would render these emotions believable. Despite advertising her horror of the Merchant Ivory school of costume drama, Nair offers no satisfying alternative to the sturdy classicism of those films. Her idea of stylishness is to keep the camera forever gliding, tipping and scurrying after the action, an irritating affectation closer to the miscalculations of Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady (1996) than the touching stateliness of Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (1993). Vanity Fair is further compromised by Nair's insistence on injecting a little post-colonial significance into proceedings (the credits come complete with a "salaam" addressed to the recently deceased Edward Said). But the appearance of Indian elements – especially a bizarre dance sequence featuring Becky – adds nothing. Ultimately, Nair has only her flair for social comedy to fall back on. It is undoubtedly fun to watch fine character actors, including Geraldine McEwan as Lady Southdown, sending up rotten the airs of fallen or ailing aristocrats, throwing out bon mots as they pamper their pets. But it is not enough to carry an entire film, and it falls very short of the grander, darker wisdom that filled Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Thackeray's Barry Lyndon (1975). MORE Nair: Kama Sutra, Mississippi Masala © Adrian Martin October 2004 |
