'Vanity Fair' is little more than that

One would think that the combination of William Thackeray's classic novel and Mira Nair's ("Monsoon Wedding") directing prowess could hardly fail to make for an excellent end-of-summer extravaganza. And one would be wrong. Despite the enormous budget, the extravagant colors, the beautiful lead and the two-and-a-half hours of film, this tired and lifeless adaptation's efforts simply amount to vanity.

The film features lady of the moment Reese Witherspoon as Becky Sharp, a beautiful British governess and social climber. As she makes her way up through the ranks of society, she seduces men, befriends women and makes enemies in all quarters. The plot also tracks the intrigues of her best friend, Amelia Sedley (Romola Garai of "Nicholas Nickelby" and "I Capture the Castle"). The plot stretches on far longer than it should, and little more is worth recounting.

To its limited credit, the film was able to produce enough shots full of impressive scenery and lavish costumes to fill quite a good trailer. But its virtues, more or less, end there. Characters are, at their best, one-dimensional. Plot points fly by in an incoherent jumble, attempting to compress every last intrigue of Thackeray's 912 page tome into an already tedious picture. Dialogue, already filled with platitudes at the film's beginning, becomes a caricature of itself by the film's end. It seems as if the picture's unimpressive writing trio of Matthew Falk, Mark Skeet and Julian Fellowes ("Gosford Park") got bored of writing an hour into this slog and simply started using the edit bar.

What's more, "Vanity Fair" fails at an even more basic level. Set in a world of aristocracy, intrigue and social scheming, this film manages to avoid giving us any insight at all into the motivations and insecurities of those that participate in this singularly unappealing life.

Jane Austen's work and (for the most part) the films made of her novels succeed not because they show a strange and superficial world, but because they demonstrate external human truths even within a strange and pretentious context. When this utter lack of insight is added to a blatant insensitivity for and ignorance of the life that all but an aristocratic few of 19th century Britons endured, this film goes from frivolous to degrading.

Add an utterly whitewashed picture of the British presence in India and a crudely Orientalist portrait of Indian culture to the mix, and the film realizes itself as truly offensive. Some atrocious acting (along with, it must be said, some that is merely mediocre) rounds out a film that I would not recommend to my worst enemy. Strike these two-and-a-half hours of painful tedium off your list.