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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Movie Listings
The Film File
No film of "Vanity Fair" can be true to Thackeray's novel, nor should it be. Bad faith, with occasional slivers of good, was his most pullulating theme, and woe betide any director who dogs the book with devotion. Better by far to fool around with it and grab what turns you on. The novel will be with us forever, but the movie is a one-night stand.
Spinning at the hub of the story is Becky Sharp (Reese Witherspoon). In the eyes of the early nineteenth century, she is a nobody, possessed of nothing more than brains, beauty, bilingualism, a fine dress sense, a lashing wit, the sexual heat of a lioness, and the singing voice of a lark. And what are such fripperies, pray, without an income of five thousand a year? The film, like the book, follows Becky's determination to find a fortune and hence become a somebody. She tags along with Amelia Sedley (Romola Garai), her best (or most serviceable) friend, sliding glossily into the Sedley household and almost into the heart of Amelia's brother Jos (Tony Maudsley). Jos's heart is dear to him, being tolerably near to his stomach, yet he rebuffs the temptress, on the glowering advice of George Osborne (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), Amelia's intended. That, anyway, is the movie's explanation; Thackeray, more stoutly, removed Jos from the scene by the simple expedient of getting him drunk on punch. Love dies before a hangover.
Round Two, and Becky, as a governess, enters the enchanted circle of the Crawleys, who hail from one of the most distinguished and flyblown rumps of the aristocracy. Sir Pitt Crawley (Bob Hoskins), who molders away in a rural mansion, has one stiff son, Pitt (Douglas Hodge), and one loose one, Rawdon (James Purefoy). There...
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