"All's fair in love & war."

Vanity Fair (2004): 4/10

Poster (c) Focus Features

It's never easy to adapt a book into a movie. Everything from the book cannot be put into the movie, and you have pacing problems that weren't a problem in the book. You can't give as much backstory, and, worst of all, you'll usually offend fans of the book. Everything except the final point applies to Vanity Fair, based off of William Makepeace Thackeray's epic novel. The largest challenge was taking this 800 page book into this two and a quarter hour movie, and that's the major fault of the three writers (including Oscar-winner [for Gosford Park] Julian Fellowes). Gosford Park and Vanity Fair shared the same problems in the writing, actually. Both had unknown characters come in at various moments, and had "important" plot elements carried out by those same unknown characters. That's the main problem with period pieces like those. So much time is spent in making everything look and feel authentic that it forgets about the important parts to movies, like plot and sensible elements to the movie. It's like modern video games: so much time is spent on graphics, the games look great but are pretty bad.

Growing up penniless in the early 19th century, Becky Sharp (Reese Witherspoon) realizes that even though it's lonely at the top, it's still the top, and she wants to get there. Then she supposedly tries to work her way up the social ladder. At least, that's what I've read. From the movie, I couldn't even tell it had a plot.

I guess I'll try comparing Vanity Fair to a piece of art. Both are nice to look at, but no matter how much you try to see deeper, there's nothing there. Anyone who says you can is lying. Vanity Fair has bright colors, looks nice, and is well shot, but there's no plot underneath. There could have been. It could have been a sickly satisfying flick about Sharp's ruthless cutthroating to climb the ladder. Instead, it's this boring period piece that seems more focused on every single supporting character and their various adventures. Do we really care about these undeveloped characters, who all look the same and have basically the same name so it's impossible to differentiate between them all? And what do the events lead up to? Was there a twist ending that we needed? Actually, I don't remember. I saw the movie two days ago, and I don't remember, yet I remember the twist to Matchstick Men perfectly. I brought up that movie because both had unnecessary 10 minute scenes at the end. If the movie had culminated with either Becky's last step to the top or the end of her fall to the bottom, then it would have been a worthwhile movie. But it seems like she barely did any climbing. I suppose we had to know the order of British classes before coming in. Damn, and I left my encyclopedia of that at home.

I'm sure that in the book, each character was well developed and crucial to the plot, yet didn't steal thunder from the main character. But this ain't the book. What happened? Who WERE these people? And how come scenes jump in time with no segue whatsoever? I'd say most of these problems are from director Mira Nair, who can't seem to say no to anything. Instead of taking out some unimportant scenes, she keeps everything in (she's probably madly in love with the book and wants to keep it the same). It's that attitude, the "it can't differ from the book" attitude that ruins adaptations. And that's what happened here at Vanity Fair. The only saving grace (besides the visuals) is Reese Witherspoon's acting. She knows her role and acts perfectly in it. Bob Hoskins wasn't half bad either, but the movie was. It was completely bad.

Rated PG-13 for some sensuality/partial nudity and a brief violent image.

Review Date: September 3, 2004