"Vanity Fair"

To be fair, a film of "Vanity Fair" would be a challenge to filmmakers far more talented than Nair. Thackeray's voice holds together his panoramic structure. Deprived of that voice, the story flits from scene to scene. Part of the problem may simply be the movie's compressed time scheme. Trying to telescope "Vanity Fair" (my Modern Library edition from the '50s runs 730 pages) into 136 minutes is an inhuman task.

But "Vanity Fair" often seems as if no one involved with it has actually read the novel. My hunch is that someone involved with the production decided that Thackeray was a dead white male whose vision needed to be "expanded" -- and I'm betting it was Nair. Part of the reason for the film's depiction of Becky as a heroine is that the society she is infiltrating is a colonial power in India. Thackeray was actually born in India and one of his characters, Jos Sedley, has made his fortune there. In Nair's vision, the English passion for all things Indian is translated into ludicrous scenes like a Sunday outing where sitars play, fire acrobats perform and tattooed women belly-dance -- in public? In early 19th century England? Even sillier is a scene where Becky takes part in parlor theatricals in which the women baring their midriffs are the respectable wives and daughters of the well-heeled, whom we have seen snubbing Becky as an intemperate jade a few scenes before. What is this Bollywood fantasy doing in the midst of "Vanity Fair"? Why, when we are meant to be in the 1800s, are we watching women writhe to what sounds like a dance remix of some bhangra hit?

It's not that directors shouldn't be free to reimagine and reinterpret. But when directors substitute their vision for that of a great artist, they run the risk of being found wanting. Thackeray, writing in 1843-44, was simply not dealing with either feminism or imperialism. Could Nair have addressed them? Yes. But the way she has chosen to do so violates the dramatic reality of the time she is working in.

A director's desire for a work to be something other than what it is doesn't just occur in bad movies -- I love Kenneth Branagh's film of "Henry V," but no matter how much he wishes it, Shakespeare did not write an antiwar play. But that film was the work of a loving upstart, a first-time director setting himself a wildly ambitious task. And it was marked by Branagh's belief that Shakespeare's vision was big enough to support his reading. Nair's vision of Thackeray has the corrective tone of a prissy schoolmarm. She has missed the universals in Thackeray because she is hung up on what's left out of his specifics. Her vanity here would fit snugly into the book. By the end of the movie, her vision seems no bigger than a speck. In setting herself against Thackeray, Nair becomes the Incredible Shrinking Director.

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