Vanity Fair
dir. Mira Nair
Focus Features

In the press for Vanity Fair, director Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding) stated her desire not to make the usual "frock movie." If we take her unaffectionate term to mean a kind of stately opulence resulting in cinematic impotence, she has succeeded. But the real intrigue of Nair's adaptation doesn't rest so much on this contrariness as it does her submersion into such an unlikely source as the 19th century social satire from William Makepeace Thackeray.

Thackeray's supreme self-consciousness as a storyteller led him to dispense with his contemporaries' moralism — he first satirized it in the serialized "Novels by Eminent Hands" before unleashing "Vanity Fair." Subtitled "A Novel Without a Hero," it's a full-blooded assault on these literary pet peeves, which creates a tricky, deliberate ambiguity that would prove hopeless for a clumsier filmmaker than Nair.

Nair's success begins with her casting: Reese Witherspoon plays Becky Sharp, a magnetic social climber who is loved as passionately as she is loathed by the accomplices to her ascent. The array of characters that surround Becky demand that the movie be viewed as an ensemble piece, including such spot-on performances as Jim Broadbent and Eileen Atkins's nuanced portrayals of parental callousness in the name of family pride. The film turns on the late arrival of the Marquess of Steyne (Gabriel Byrne), who synthesizes the rest of the cast's mannered fury into devastating rejoinders that pierce through the society Becky longs to penetrate.

Not everything works; it's been awhile since a film has offered a vamp as sexless as Witherspoon's Becky, although it's a flaw inherited from Thackeray. (Even Miriam Hopkins's 1935 Becky suggests a more robust eroticism, and in two-strip Technicolor at that.) And the Bollywood bang-for-your-buck ethos is shoehorned awkwardly into several all-singing, all-dancing, all-preening set pieces.

What most elevates Vanity Fair above its stodgy kin, however, is that the moment of inspiration melding the filmmakers to the source didn't stall in the set design. Nair's technical exuberance serves to mask the film's luxuriousness: This period spectacle is trimmed with close-ups, mobile cameras and asymmetrical compositions that open up the drama to let the characters breathe — viewers of Monsoon Wedding are likely to recognize the casual intimacy.

More curiously, Nair's relationship to Becky Sharp is felt throughout. Sometimes a shot lingers on Witherspoon a moment longer than necessary and you become aware of an Amelie-like radiance inappropriate to the character. Thackeray really did set out to write unredeeming characters, and our admiration of Becky's cunning is to stop well short of adoration. At best, fictional characters in any story are open-ended ideas. To fall in love with them unconditionally is to pervert the author's intended context or, even worse, to drop out of the dialogue completely. This is precisely where Thackeray's and Nair's conceptions of Becky Sharp contrast — along the line of sentimentality. Thackeray uses her as a weapon against it, while Nair piously indulges.

— Andrew Stout (andrewstout at gmail dot com)