VANITY FAIR
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Becky Sharp (Reese Witherspoon, "Legally Blonde 2, Red, White and Blonde")
and Amelia Sedley (Romola Garai, "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights") leave Miss
Pinkerton's School for Girls as an orphan and a cosseted young woman of
means, but the best friends will see their fortunes reversed in "Vanity Fair."
You can take the director out of India, but...Mira Nair gives William
Makepeace Thackeray's Napoleonic War era satire the Bollywood treatment
with a good dose of "Gone With the Wind" thrown in for good measure. While
the film looks gorgeous and Reese Witherspoon is quite fetching as the gold
digging Becky, the film demands too many abrupt about-faces for characters
who are given episodic screen time to make epic evolutions.
Becky is introduced as a scruffy urchin putting on a marionette show that
foreshadows her own future. The young girl assures her own downfall when
she demands ten guineas for her father's portrait of her deceased mother,
her own sentimentality priced right. The man who buys the painting will
meet Becky much later in life and repeat the transaction on a much grander
scale.
Nair and her screenwriters, Matthew Faulk and "Gosford Park's" Julian
Fellowes, in adapting a book subtitled 'a novel without a hero,' warm their
heroine's cold heart, making her subsequent downfall seem rather harsh.
Also muddled is the character of George Osborne (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers,
sinking back to villainy after his lovely good guy turn in "Bend It Like
Beckham"), whose motivations for marrying Amelia are botched by the
filmmakers - is it Dobbin's (an affecting Rhys Ifans, "Danny Deckchair")
impassioned cry for decency, a rebellious act against his father or a true
change of heart? The latter explanation is immediately dashed by his
despicable behavior towards his pregnant wife and poor Romola Garai is left
playing an Amelia who is an unpleasant mix of stupidity, loyalty and
selfishness. Particularly affected by the film's jumps in time is the
character of Rawdon Crawley (played by "Resident Evil's" James Purefoy in
perhaps the film's best performance), whose exit from Becky's life is
sudden when weighed against all that has come before it (Nair's staging of
this scene simply screams of Rhett Butler's famous departure, just as the
flight from Brussels strongly smacks of the fleeing of Atlanta. Later,
Rawdon's sister-in-law becomes his Melanie). "Vanity Fair's" conclusion is
sure to offend purists and begins to reek of its director's determination
to stamp her heritage upon her film wherever possible.
Nevertheless, "Vanity Fair" is an entertaining enough bauble, with its lush
art direction (Sam Stokes and Lucinda Thomson) and sumptuous costumes
(Beatrix Aruna Pasztor, "In the Cut"). A huge cast of name actors like
Gabriel Byrne ("Spider"), Bob Hoskins ("Maid In Manhattan"), Geraldine
McEwan ("The Magdalene Sisters") and the ubiquitous Jim Broadbent, "Around
the World in 80 Days") dress up the cast with their presences, but only
"Cold Mountain's Eileen Atkins scores strongly as the controlling Aunt Tilly.
C+
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========== X-RAMR-ID: 38586 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1316028 X-RT-TitleID: 1135805 X-RT-SourceID: 386 X-RT-AuthorID: 1487 X-RT-RatingText: C+
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