Mira Nair's latest cinematic endeavor, "Vanity Fair," is a sumptuous feast of colors, textures, and cleverness. Filling the screen with fantastic costumes and excellent performances, "Vanity Fair" provides a strong start to this fall's hotly anticipated film season.
Considered by some to be an unusual choice to helm "Vanity Fair," Nair brings the same vibrancy and epic scope to William Makepeace Thackeray's 1828 literary masterpiece as she did to "Monsoon Wedding" (2001) and "Kama Sutra" (1996). To some extent, "Vanity Fair" and many of Nair's other films explore the same themes. Her previous works navigate through complex social structures as well as familial power struggles. In her current endeavor, Nair portrays the trials of Becky Sharp's social climbing with the same ease that she showed in presenting the tribulations of sixteenth century Indian royalty in her earlier films.
In a recent interview on NPR, Nair remarked that Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" could be the plotline of any Bollywood extravaganza. A tale with all the complicated intrigue of a convoluted episode of a daytime soap opera, "Vanity Fair" follows Becky Sharp (Reese Witherspoon) from her humble beginnings as a penniless artist's daughter to her perilous ascent through English society.
The original wit of Thackeray's sixty-five chapter novel is for the most part intact thanks to a tight screenplay that highlights the best of lines. Even the many subplots do not bog the viewer down, despite their complexity. Nair's Becky is arguably less conniving than Thackeray's shrewd and calculating anti-heroine, but Witherspoon brings an unfettered charisma and humanity to her character. Becky Sharp has never been so flatteringly portrayed.
The ensemble also does an exceptional job of keeping up with Thackeray's scathing character portrayals. Gabriel Byrne makes the hedonistic Lord Steyne an eerily appealing and equally terrifying gatekeeper of society. Eileen Atkins and Bob Hoskins as siblings Miss Matilda Crawley and Sir Pitt Crawley create wonderfully hypocritical characters. Even the younger members of the cast such as Jonathan Rhys-Meyers ("Bend It Like Beckham") and James Purefoy ("A Knight's Tale") as George Osbourne and Rawdon Crawley are handsome and convincing as their respective characters.
One specific quality of this film that will undoubtedly garner attention from Academy members come December is its incredible art direction. Nair's penchant for the colors and flavors of her homeland is undeniable. Colorful fabrics and light spill off the screen. Nair uses visuals liberally to create mood and underline character traits.
While the film begins with mostly historically accurate costuming, the costumes mirror Becky's moral decline by becoming more elaborate and grotesquely beautiful. Hairstyles and even make-up become more outrageous as the film progresses. A few characters, such as Captain Dobbin, are less adorned amongst the visual sprawl of "Vanity Fair" to emphasis their inherent goodness.
Nair carries these strong visual decisions through to her set designs as well. For example, while Becky works as a governess at the Crawley estate, the manor is dilapidated and plagued with dust and grime. Working her way into the good graces of the Crawley family, Becky revamps the whole estate into a thoroughly respectable bourgeois home.
A small admonition against "Vanity Fair" could be its attempt to create a heroic figure in a work of literature that is a self-declared "novel without a hero." However, this perhaps compassionate approach to the work does reflect its timelessness. It is not difficult to picture Becky Sharp as a young inexperienced intern working her way up the political ladder through a mix of charm and deception. Indeed, she is a modern woman in a nineteenth century story.
