Vanity Fair

Fortune cookie: Vanity Fair is British costume drama with sass, verve and sex appeal

By Jeannette Catsoulis

"I think I could be a good woman if I had Ł5,000 a year."--Becky Sharp

On paper, it must have caused the money men some concern: Indian director Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding) directing a lavish British costume drama about one of the 19th century's most resilient fictional heroines. But Britain and India have had at least 400 years to get to know--if not exactly love--one another, and Nair has given us a Vanity Fair bristling with their entwined histories. The result is a picture more daring, more unexpected and more thoroughly alive than anything this stuffy genre has seen since Gosford Park. And even Altman balked at real live elephants.

Fans of William Thackeray's hefty novel will need to calm themselves over the page-to-screen adjustments (such as ending the film just before the book becomes a total downer). Nair wisely opts for spirit over letter--she wants us to feel the story's energy and style, not its punctuation. The rise and fall of Becky Sharp (Reese Witherspoon), a low-born adventuress with only looks and wits to sustain her, is perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the times; her gatecrashing of 19th century London society a cunning metaphor for the entitlement-steeped behavior of Britain itself. Becky, the daughter of an impoverished artist and a Parisian chorus girl, understands intuitively that money and influence are always available to those with the nerve to go after them.

Nair makes this point immediately, opening on Becky as a child demanding an outrageous sum from the sinister Marquis of Steyne (Gabriel Byrne) in exchange for one of her father's paintings. From there--after some polishing at Miss Pinkerton's school--Becky, now a fetching and razor-witted young woman, is dispatched to the chaotic Crawley household as governess. With her fluent French and impressive organizational skills she soon whips the Crawleys into shape, earning the devotion of Sir Pitt (a delightful Bob Hoskins), the lust of son Rawdon (James Purefoy), and--most critically--the knowing admiration of wealthy spinster Miss Matilda (a glorious Eileen Atkins).

As Becky elbows her way onto the social calendar, sporadically accumulating money and husbands, the film sweeps us from London to France to Germany to India--pausing for breath at the Battle of Waterloo--before coming to rest on the back of a bejeweled elephant. Along the way, the script (by Julian Fellowes and Matthew Faulk) masterfully choreographs love and greed, devotion and selfishness with the melodramatic verve of the best bodice-rippers.

Which is another way of saying that Vanity Fair has an earthy, electrifying sensuality that James Ivory's genteel dramas have never achieved. Scene after scene overflows with female flesh, as ladies raise their skirts to splash barefoot in petal-strewn ponds and a prim salon is electrified by a provocative, primal dance number. (Witherspoon's real-life pregnancy adds significantly to the movie's general air of fecundity.) Ivory could never have imagined a London like this, with parakeets and peacocks and olive-skinned beggars; or the moment when Becky, carrying a rolled Indian carpet, trips in the street and spins, laughing, across the brilliant pattern unfurling beneath her.

With Britain's footprint already in India (Thackeray himself was born in Calcutta), Nair's joyful merging of the cultures makes perfect sense. Energized by its director, the cast is uniformly excellent; and even if you would have preferred a little less Elle Woods and a little more Tracy Flick, there's no denying Witherspoon's mastery of the role. Throughout, Nair dresses her in crimsons and purples and cobalt blues--the colors of a woman, not the pastels of a young girl. She understands that Becky Sharp, like Moll Flanders, was never anyone's girl.