Her eyes snapping like tiny firecrackers and jutting her chin, Reese Witherspoon makes an appealingly crafty Becky Sharp in Mira Nair's bland but color-drenched adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's 1848 novel, Vanity Fair. Witherspoon, as usual, conveys a bristly, determined spunk.
But if her performance emits enough sparks to hold the screen, it never ignites a dramatic brush fire. Despite her make-do British accent, she is quintessentially American in attitude and body language, even more a fish out of water in Vanity Fair than she seemed in The Importance of Being Earnest.
PHOTO COURTESY OF PANDASIA
Witherspoon's upbeat approach in the film, which opens today, makes her Becky more likable than other portrayals (and there have been many, most famously by Miriam Hopkins in the 1935 movie Becky Sharp, the first Hollywood feature in Technicolor).
But with its diminished gravitas, this Becky comes across as a lightweight schemer about as formidable as an aspiring trophy wife on a daytime soap. When the movie is over, you half expect Witherspoon to turn to the camera and plead, "You still like me, don't you?"
The ascent of Becky, the orphaned daughter of an impoverished artist and a French opera dancer, to the treacherous peaks of 19th-century London society and her subsequent fall from grace, plays more like the story of a cheerfully reckless flirt than of the swath cut by an unscrupulous social climber.
Becky has been cited as the literary role model for Scarlett O'Hara (a claim Margaret Mitchell denied). And as you watch Witherspoon's Becky spin her webs, you long for a lot more Scarlett O'Hara and a lot less Elle Woods.
In studiously compressing a novel that spans three decades of early 19th-century British social history into 138 minutes, the movie becomes increasingly hurried as it struggles to compress so many subplots. Eventually it loses track of time, and its refusal to show the characters aging over 30 years adds to the confusion.
The screenplay, by Matthew Faulk, Mark Skeet and Julian Fellowes, applies the same mosaic technique to Vanity Fair that Fellowes brought to Gosford Park, but the novel's daunting size prevents its being pieced into a similarly tidy jigsaw puzzle.
But Vanity Fair has a deeper conceptual confusion. In mixing satire and romance, the movie proves once again that the two are about as compatible as lemon juice and heavy cream.
The Thaceray novel is a sweeping satire of the rampant drive for upward mobility in a Britain newly flush with the wealth flowing from its colonies. Thackeray grounded the novel in an omniscient, often caustic voice looking down (and askance) at his characters and their foibles.
The movie flashes to comic life in those scenes that convey Thackeray's disdain for the preening foolishness and snobbery of early 19th-century British society and the crass symbiotic relationship between money and aristocracy.
The movie's brightest moments belong to Eileen Atkins, as Matilda Crawley, the wealthy, tart-tongued spinster who takes an instant liking to Becky for her cleverness and candid wit and adopts her as a social pet. Once Atkins fades from the movie, it never fully recovers.
At the same time, Vanity Fair toys half-heartedly with billowy romantic drama, and its token gestures emulating Gone With the Wind are too clear and clumsy to ignore.
Nair, the Indian-born director of Monsoon Wedding also can't resist embellishing the novel's connections to her South Asian roots and slaps on a contemporary multicultural gloss. Two outlandish Bollywood-flavored production numbers come off as jarring digressions that seem shoehorned in from another movie.
In the first, Witherspoon, flanked by dancers, does a grinding Indian-flavored hoochy-cooch, worthy of Britney Spears.
Byrne's Steyne may be the film's most complex character, and the movie has pungent but too-brief performances by Bob Hoskins as Pitt Crawley and Jim Broadbent as Osborne. Amelia's devoted, longtime suitor Dobbin (Rhys Ifans) is acknowledged only long enough for him to register as a piece in the puzzle.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and