Vanity Fair   
 

Rebecca Sharp: Reese Witherspoon

Amelia Sedley: Romola Garai

Rawdon Crawley: James Purefoy

William Dobbin: Rhys Ifans

Miss Matilda Crawley: Eileen Atkins

The Marquess of Steyne: Gabriel Byrne

Sir Pitt Crawley: Bob Hoskins

 

Directed by Mira Nair

 

Screenplay by Matthew Faulk 

& Mark Skeet and Julian Fellowes

 

Based on the Novel by William Makepeace Thackeray
With a movie like Vanity Fair, it is hard to figure out exactly where it began to go off course.  A young, talented and promising director coupled with a star possessing skill, beauty, and charisma usually spells success.  And while this movie isn't bad, it just never achieves what you feel or hoped that it should.

Reese Witherspoon stars as Rebecca Sharp, a governess with dreams of climbing the ladder of early 19th century English society.  Her strategies are endless and in her attempts it is easily questionable how sincere her motives truly are.  She eventually marries Rawdon Crawley, a soldier who stands to inherit a good deal from Matilda Crawley.  Despite the friendship between Rebecca and Matilda, Rawdon's marriage to a mere governess persuades his aunt to write him out of her will.

Witherspoon is an accomplished actress and she creates a likable character in spite of Rebecca's many flaws.  Every action is guided by pure selfishness, and attaining the things she set out for is never enough.  Once she gets a small slice of the kind of life she seeks, she shuns happiness and fulfillment for that next rung.  In her quest, everything begins to unravel as she loses the relationships she had previously managed to keep over the years with her friend Amelia, her husband and her son.

Amelia (Romola Garai) serves as Rebecca's opposite.  While Rebecca will stop at nothing in her pursuit, Amelia remains content in increasingly bad situations.  She holds on to the memory of a heartless husband, relinquishes the care of her only son, and eschews the love of the one man that has always cared for her.  She remains vulnerable and blind to life in her magnanimity.

The fate of these two characters forms the crux of the movie as we wonder if they will be redeemed.  And the film wraps itself up neatly enough with a few chance encounters that allow these two women to reconcile their pasts and turn towards the future. 

Vanity Fair is a sprawling mess of a movie that is only partially saved by the good acting and lush direction - Mira Nair does show a flair for balancing the squalor that Rebecca is trying to leave with the opulence she is trying to work her way into.  It's enjoyable to a certain extent, but eventually, trying to tell this complex story in a concise way bogs down the film.  As a result, the story is sometimes hard to follow as the film throws you around to different locations and moments in time with barely a pause to absorb where it had just been.

This is one of the few films that I feel could have actually been improved with a longer running time.  Some of the confusion could have easily been alleviated with a better examination into each successive plot point.  Instead, the film plays more like a series of brief vignettes about the intricate lives of the main characters, thus, revealing nothing as you attempt to decipher it.  Vanity Fair is epic in scope, but, unfortunately, is never fully realized.