Vanity Fair (2004)

In Vanity Fair (2004), Reese Witherspoon plays Becky Sharp, who seems to have trained her whole life to become an expert at all things classy and charming. In quick succession she gets out of her French teaching/culture-making job, marries a soldier, and sets to work climbing the social ladder.  Eventually she makes the grave mistake of performing a Bollywood number, driving Gabriel Byrne so wild with passion that he tries to rape her, which her husband witnesses. Then he initiates a divorce and dies offscreen in India. “The colonization of India” itself is a backdrop the film delicately comments on by inserting prodigious tabla playing whenever someone mentions “India.” (A comment on this below.) Some other stuff happens but I found it hard to pin down exactly what. Vanity Fair strikes me as a movie made by someone entirely too familiar with the source material, hitting all the big beats but missing the logistical portions needed to make it comprehensible.

Almost everyone in the film is part of an undifferentiated costumed blob, so I devised a visual shorthand to help distinguish characters, using sideburn style or “being Bob Hoskins” for the men, and age or “are they Reese Witherspoon” for the women. This imperfect system caused some issues, such as in a scene where a corpse was shown with sideburns obscured.  The corpse turned out to be an important character, which I found out because someone in the movie mentioned the death later. I felt that the film frequently either killed or married an important character offscreen, then later had a character talk about it. Too polite and well-mannered to show what actually happens in the story? Relaying important plot points through subtle social cues and gossip? These methods destroy Becky for twelve years, after which she’s whisked off to India (tabla sounds!), and they destroy the movie for probably forever.

Although overall Vanity Fair is confusing and bad, there are some nice things. There’s a good scene where some guy goes to India, gets dusty and hunky, and becomes a martial arts badass; this development is never referred to again. There’s also a long sequence where Becky refuses to sell someone a horse, then trades someone else the horse for a ride in a carriage, then refuses the carriage ride. Everyone talks in a pseudo accent (from my notes: “British Accent?”). There’s also a part where not-with-child Becky becomes eight-months-pregnant Becky right in the middle of a scene (possible causes of swift pregnancy: ballroom dancing; note she placed in bodice; war breaking out with the Dutch).     

With its commitments to razzle dazzle and fast and loose storytelling it can sometimes feel as though Vanity Fair was striving to become a Transformers for the powdered wig crowd.  Although it does have plenty of “robots with lips” moments, it lacks the wit, social graces, and Machiavellian maneuvering it takes to become a truly unstoppable Victorian franchise. Perhaps it’ll be worth watching once Hollywood is done with superheroes and moves on to a period pieces phase – if only to prepare for the sequel “BECKY SHARP V. MARIE ANTOINETTE.” Until then I would urge period piece fans and innocent bystanders alike to steer clear.

I wanted to watch this because it’s a Thackeray adaptation with a Julian Fellowes screenplay; Fellowes wrote Gosford Park (2001) & Downton Abbey (2010-2015), and other Thackeray adaptations I like include Barry Lyndon (1975), so I thought this might be a valid double feature with the new Yorgos Lanthimos period piece, The Favourite (2018). (I swear not every post is gonna be abt Barry Lyndon.) But compared to Gosford Park (which rules) or The Favourite (which I liked a lot), Vanity Fair feels small.

There’s no denying the architecture, but Reese Witherspoon’sstyling and much of the overall production design looks plastic, even kinda 90s. Except in brief establishing shots there’re hardly any expansive views of anything or moments without speech; most scenes are dialogue presented in cuts between talking heads, shot head-on above the waist. Crowd scenes focus on one character, while unleashed extras scamper in the background with “unintelligible crowd shouting” copiously overdubbed. Scenes with any blocking or any physicality to them at all are awkward; in one, James Purefoy even “lounges on a settee” in a way that manages to make it look like he hasn’t figured out what “sitting down” should properly consist of.

I realized the “period movies” journey Barry Lyndon sent me on has been the wrong pursuit; what I’m looking for is another movie world that’s at least that lush, not just another good movie set in the 19th century. Still, it’s confounding that the extraordinarily beautiful $11M budget 1975 movie could somehow set a standard for lushness in the “period movie” genre that a $23M budget 2004 movie could fall so miserably short of. Were the lessons on costume, cinematography, and especially lighting somehow not totally apparent? Are they that hard to follow? Okay maybe but isn’t it at all compelling to… try?

My problem here isn’t that Reese Witherspoon’s never sweaty or that her dresses look like they were made in 2003 for the movie, but that her world fails to present as a living thing wriggling beyond the frame. The frame itself rarely shows more than a talking torso, and even some entire story locations – e.g. the best friend’s poverty farmhouse, or James Purefoy’s landing in “the tropics” – are visually left downright vague. The whole thing feels like looking at a painting with an overworked middle where the painter clearly didn’t bother considering the edges.

We saw the Delacroix show at the Met the other week; pretty cool that a productive person can keep busy enough to make a lush beguiling world of work that can survive ~200 years and the trip to NYC. Zoom in on the Faust drawings; sick at the from-the-hand drawing level. Zoom out on I dunno, “the Battle of Nancy”; sick at the room-swallowing macro level too. Pretty cool that art history continued its trek to present day NYC as well. Back in the studio, the feeling isn’t that Delacroix killed ultra-dynamic representational painting so completely that Instagram-era painters should chill and stick to making half-baked paintings of the Photoshop interface or whatever, because “that’s all that’s left.” It’s the opposite: The feeling is of the insane challenge to synthesize inspiring things, learning from and advancing them. When I see stuff that’s not interested in this challenge/conversation in whatever format, such as here, I briefly wonder what drove its authorship at all, right before I stop thinking abt it entirely.