"Vanity Fair"

Reese Witherspoon as an "early feminist" is just one of many woeful missteps in Mira Nair's disastrous take on Thackeray's literary classic.

By Charles Taylor

Sep 1, 2004 | William Thackeray once protested that Victorian novelists like him were not permitted to write with the candor that Henry Fielding had enjoyed in the 18th century. But in "Vanity Fair" Thackeray turned the imposed discretion of his age to killing advantage. "Vanity Fair" must be the most decorous savage novel ever written, and it's one of a handful of novels that can be said to describe a complete vision of the world.

The "world" in "Vanity Fair" is England in the years around Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo; Thackeray's portrait of human nature isn't limited to any time or place. Reading the novel, you feel that Thackeray got into it everything he ever witnessed or suspected about human motives. It's a profoundly skeptical book. Thackeray pits worldliness against goodness with no illusions about which quality usually triumphs. Put it this way: In a Dickens novel, a small boy rescued from the torments of a bully will almost certainly grow up to be an exemplar of kindness and gentleness. The same boy, in Thackeray, grows up to be a snob and a rotter and hateful to the friend who saved him from the bully. Multiply those incidents into a panorama that stretches nearly the entire height of early 19th century English society, and are embodied in Thackeray's protagonist, the scheming, status-seeking Becky Sharp, and you have an overwhelmingly coherent and devastating satiric vision.

There may be filmmakers whose own vision is vast enough to take on Thackeray's, but Mira Nair isn't one of them. Her new film of "Vanity Fair" is a disaster. Scene by scene and moment to moment, it's a woeful misreading of the book. To see what's wrong with the movie you need only compare the tag line used in some of the ads -- "On Sept. 1, a heroine will rise" -- with the subtitle Thackeray gave his book: "A Novel Without a Hero."

Nair's version is something like a revue version of "Gone With the Wind." Becky Sharp (Reese Witherspoon), the scrappy orphan who works her way up from governess to member of the bourgeoisie, is the heroine here -- the spiritual sister to Scarlett O'Hara, Lorelei Lee and Madonna. She's the movie's Material Maiden, the bitch we're meant to root for. Nair presents Becky's barely disguised avarice and ambition as rebellion against the class-ridden hypocrisy of English society. Witherspoon is quoted in the movie's production notes as saying, "In my opinion, Becky Sharp is an early feminist ... she'd been deprived of parents and has no place to go in the world -- yet she still manages to succeed. Every success she has in her life is based on her own merit, which is a modern idea for a period story."

Compare that with what Thackeray writes about Becky: "Miss Rebecca Sharp has twice had occasion to thank Heaven ... in the first place, for ridding her of some person whom she hated, and secondly, for enabling her to bring her enemies to some sort of perplexity or confusion ... Miss Rebecca Sharp was not, then, in the least kind or placable. All the world used her ill, said this young misanthropist, and we may be pretty certain that persons whom all the world treats ill, deserve entirely the treatment they get."

Next Page: Turning Thackeray's characters into caricatures

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