Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair

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Movie Reviews of Vanity Fair

Movie Review: The best television has to offer
Summary: 5 Stars

"Vanity Fair," set in the years surrounding Napoleon's resurgence in Europe, traces the rise and fall of two young British women, Rebecca Sharp and Amelia Sedley. The two young ladies meet in a sort of finishing school and when the time to reenter society arrives, Amelia takes Rebecca home with her to meet the family. The Sedley clan is comfortably upper middle class, with the father earning a nice living speculating on government bonds. Also home in time to greet the two is Amelia's buffoonish brother Jos, recently returned from his minor government post in India. Becky, an orphan who is essentially a gold digger of epic proportions, attempts to attach herself to the portly and arrogant Jos with hilarious results. Amelia looks forward to reacquainting herself with George Osborne, the son of one of her father's business partners and a first class cad. Nearby is William Dobbin, George's best friend and a decent man who has a huge crush on the clueless Amelia. Jos soon ruins any chance he has with Becky when he gets drunk on a group outing. From this point forward, a vast array of hilarious yet contemptible characters prance across Thackeray's stage.

As Dobbin and Osborn head off to continental Europe to fight against Napoleon, Becky obtains a job as a governess for a deteriorating noble family called the Crawleys. Sharp's job soon finds her embroiled in the tumultuous politics of this clan as all of the family members vie with each other in an attempt to curry favor from the rich but ailing Miss Crawley. It isn't too long before Becky receives a marriage proposal from the patriarch of the family at about the same time she runs off with the man's son. As Sharp navigates through the convoluted realms of the rich and powerful in an effort to secure for herself a better social position, Amelia encounters her own problems. The family loses its money with Napoleon's defeat and must find a way to survive. The quick marriage between Amelia and George ends just as rapidly when Osborne dies on the battlefield, leaving behind a pregnant Amelia and an infuriated elder Osborne who wants nothing to do with his son's widow. Caught in the middle is Dobbin, who desperately wishes to make Amelia his own but cannot bring himself to compete with the memory of dearly departed George. The fun of reading and watching "Vanity Fair" is in seeing how all of these disparate threads come together in the end.

The BBC production of Thackeray's work does a wonderful job of adapting his novel to television. Only a few scenes in the book fail to make an appearance here, something I consider as a sign of a successful production. Where "Vanity Fair" the television movie succeeds most is in the cast chosen to portray the diverse characters. I happened to read a version of the book that included the original drawings that accompanied Thackeray's story, and I must say that it is obvious the producers of this movie studied these sketches in detail. One need only look at the resemblance actor Gerard Murphy's Lord Steyne has to the pictures in the novel to recognize how closely the producers followed Thackeray's vision. The whole cast does a marvelous job of mirroring the characters in "Vanity Fair," but Natasha Little as Rebecca Sharp deserves special mention. Her performance is tremendous, and the transformation she undergoes from a slightly pretty schoolgirl to a stunning beauty with social rank is amazing. Moreover, Little captures perfectly Becky's barely contained scorn for those around her. With a roll of the eyes, a slight shrug of the shoulders, and a mischievous grin she devastatingly disparages all of the nonsense going on around her. You simply cannot help but like her. As bad as Becky Sharp is as a person, Thackeray throws you a curve ball at the end that upends everything we think we know about her.

I liked the DVD presentation, although there aren't any extras to speak of on the discs. One thing that did surprise me about this production was the booming background music that fires up from time to time. It's a type of spicy music replete with blatting horns, and the first time it came on it nearly blew my speaker system out. I ended up enjoying the music, though, as it seemed to add an element of whimsy to many scenes that are, frankly, whimsical. I simply don't have anything bad to say about this movie. It is a must see.

Summary of Vanity Fair

Becky is scorned for her lack of breeding, but as one admirer notes, "she's got pluck." Poised to begin her new job as a governess, Becky's calculated social climbing begins in the home of her friend, the naive Amelia Sedley (Frances Grey), whose father is a wealthy merchant. She immediately makes a play for Amelia's doofus brother, but their budding romance is sabotaged by Amelia's fiancé George Osborne (Tom Ward), an "interfering, officious snob" who doesn't fancy a governess for a sister-in-law. And so it's out into the world, where Becky works her wiles on a gallery of memorable characters, including her lecherous new employer Sir Pitt; his imperious rich sister Miss Crawley (Miriam Margolyes), who takes Becky under her wing; and Pitt's dashing son Rawdon (Nathanial Perker), the first of Becky's misguided sexual entanglements.

Vanity Fair charts in lavish detail Becky's rise in London society and her scandalous downfall. Her story is counterpoint to that of the fair Amelia, who is clueless that her husband is a rake and that his best friend, the loyal, long-suffering Dobbin (Philip Glenistar), is in love with her and is her secret benefactor when times get bad for her bankrupt father. Adapted for the screen by Andrew Davies, who did the honors for the phenomenally successful Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair is another addictive miniseries that is the video equivalent of a compulsive page-turner. As yet another fancier remarks, "Well done, Becky Sharp." --Donald Liebenson