Cartoon Critique

YOU COULD SAY Reese Witherspoon already played Becky Sharp, the protagonist of Vanity Fair, in Alexander Payne's Election. As the nearly sociopathic high school pol Tracy Flick, Witherspoon was the modern-day incarnation of scheming, grasping ambition. It is interesting that when Michael Moore presented the Best Screenplay prize to Payne at the 2000 New York Film Critics Circle Award dinner, he mischievously identified Tracy Flick as a teenage Hillary Clinton (Moore's then-favorite target). Tracy was an authentic American character but, like the rest of Election's cast, she was more than a simplistic foil; she was a universally recognizable type.

Casting Witherspoon to play the protagonist of William Makepeace Thackeray's 19th-century novel Vanity Fair is director Mira Nair's short-cut to representing that complex personality. Nair assumes that Witherspoon will bring audiences more than halfway into identifying with Becky Sharp (an impoverished painter's daughter who arduously calculates her way through British society in the early 1800s), simply by reprising Tracy's temperament. But through Nair's own miscalculation, Becky Sharp's rise and fall and determination are relayed without either Payne's satirical affection or Thackeray's.

Nair refuses to make peace with Thackeray's ironic view of British social conventions. This isn't a Masterpiece Theater or Merchant-Ivory production of a classic. Nair chooses to be at odds with the book's canonical status, rather than confirm its complicated ambivalence about British manners. She refuses the satirical aspects of Vanity Fair, and this loss of tone (fairly illustrated in Kubrick's 1975 film of Thackeray's Barry Lyndon) indicates the clash of Nair's modern politics with British literary tradition. Though not crude and reductive in the Michael Moore manner, Nair takes issue with the typical representation of British history in what is called Empire Dramas. She goes for a look that is alternately drab and garish-avoiding the antique-shop, art-gallery snootiness of Merchant-Ivory and Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility. Nair's sensibility is almost scabrous, sending Becky Sharp through a hellish Olde England full of petty motives, mean faces and repellant atmosphere.

What's the point of making a long movie of such unrelenting heartlessness? When Payne exposed the pettiness of Election's characters, he still sympathized culturally. Nair, who was born in India, first made social documentaries and then a fiction debut with the dense, harrowing Salaam Bombay!, the story of an orphaned kid struggling to survive urban India's crime-ridden streets. Even though Salaam Bombay! showed the influence of Dickens' Oliver Twist, Nair appears to harbor some cultural antagonism. She undermines Thackeray's balanced cultural sympathy with a nearly scurrilous social portrait. Vanity Fair's plot is conveyed with no love for witty, tumbling narrative construction (tropes that Kubrick delighted in tweaking), but with undisguised skepticism for the cultural glory Thackeray's ingenuity might represent.

Determined to prove she's too smart to fall for white Western hegemony, Nair imposes a new kind of cultural dogma. She means to subject this "classic" to her own third-world, Harvard-educated revision. Instead of a movie designed to glamorize the estates, the clothes, the diction, this Vanity Fair says, "Look at all these messed-up white people!" Fair enough given the typically racist, overly reverential genre Nair essays, but this is not a harmless approach. Working with cinematographer Declan Quinn (who also shot Nair's lustrous Kama Sutra), this film is a study in repulsion-a veritable genre critique. Every new personage is a caricature. Bob Hoskins' Sir Pitt Crawley runs a decrepit manor; Eileen Atkins' Miss Matilda Crawley is his unpleasant spinster sister; Romola Garai physicalizes the neurosis of Becky's best friend Amelia Sedley; Gabriel Byrne creeps about as Becky's benefactor-then-nemesis, the lecherous Marquess of Steyne; and James Purefoy realizes the role of Rawdon Crawley, Becky's dissolute husband, almost too well. Each person looks sweaty, sallow and bedraggled.

Unlike the terse, didactic characterizations that David Mamet insisted upon in The Winslow Boy (most critics ignored Mamet's Clinton-era allegory, preferring to wallow in their own Anglophilia), Nair's foul sketches suggest the revenge of the Subcontinent. Thackeray's parallel reflections on life in colonial India are expanded to show up desiccated London society-as in a grotesquely dressed ball where the aristos snub Becky. At a later soiree, Becky wins them over singing bel canto, but this is eventually contrasted to a scene where she flaunts her independence, rebelliously performing as an Indian Nautch girl. This hip-shaking dance sequence, essentially a Kama Sutra outtake, violates Thackeray's entire concept. It's in the same "Take that, Merchant-Ivory!" spirit as the bathing scene where Dame Atkins literally shows her pale, flabby ass.

Eccentric rather than radical, it's hard to tell whether Nair is inept or just contemptuous. Her mixed motivations become clearer as the film proceeds: Modern ethnic and feminist interests combine to derange Thackeray's story. A very weird detachment is evident throughout this unsympathetic film. Like Shekhar Kapoor's revisionist Elizabeth and The Four Feathers, a new ideology surfaces by which non-white filmmakers righteously enervate white cultural totems. But rather than create improved visions of history and character, these films offer indie-era identity politics. Instead of taking Becky as an emblem of her time and place, Nair internalizes Becky's plight as a personal affront. Now it's all about how women struggle in a society corrupted by class and race prejudice and that is disrespectful to them. (The Marquess of Steyne roars to his daughters "You are here to have babies. There isn't anyone here who doesn't wish you dead!") The scene feels particularly harsh since Nair already seems indifferent to Becky-we're trapped between Becky's venality, the snooty daughters and the monstrous Marquess.

Nair's new method-call it reactionary classicism-is much less effective than Terence Davies' personally inspired film of The House of Mirth. The result is a film so disorienting and unpleasant that it may, in fact, be worse than the previous racist, sexist hegemony of old Hollywood. (Vanity Fair was last filmed in 1935 starring Miriam Hopkins.) Old-guard filmmakers understood what was artful and worthy in classical texts without sharing the rectifying compulsion (and audacity) claimed by today's indie filmmakers. Nair's film recalls the fashionable updating in last year's Cold Mountain, which boasted warped feminism and Confederate revisionism as the justification of its awkward storytelling.

Some of the worst films of the past decade (Portrait of a Lady, The Deep End, The Hours, Far from Heaven, Moulin Rouge, Bamboozled, In the Bedroom) are consequences of this egocentric rethinking. Credible human experience is replaced by the politricks of identity privilege: spurious gayness, spurious feminism, spurious blackness-but not humanism. Thackeray's panoply of social types is splintered by Julien Fellowes' screenplay; since Nair doesn't provide the harmony of voices, experiences and grace that Altman brought to Fellowes' Gosford Park, skepticism takes over. Nair shows Becky leaving wretched England for life in India. This is either a dreadful or delusional alternative-anyone who's seen Salaam Bombay! knows hell awaits.

Nair's ending doesn't resonate like the ending of Election, where Tracy lives among us (Monica Lewinsky with a work ethic). Nair fails to modernize Vanity Fair in a valuable way that might make audiences critical of the ruthlessness Becky Sharp represents (a trait handed down to transatlantic media tyrant Tina Brown). Reese Witherspoon never really gets this. The atrocious The Importance of Being Earnest proved Witherspoon was all wrong for British arrogance. With her googly-eyed, sharp-angled, clown-sculpture face, Witherspoon should be madcap or impish.

The failure to make a true connection between Tracy and Becky comes down to both Nair's lack of feeling and Witherspoon's clueless withdrawal into the legally blonde egoism that has made her bankable. Neither woman is thoughtful enough to realize what Becky Sharp has in common with Scarlett O'Hara, still the greatest female character in Hollywood cinema-duplicitous, childlike and split between monetary and amorous passion. Scarlett (also the unacknowledged prototype of Cold Mountain's heroine) held Hollywood's mirror up to itself. The social critique of this Vanity Fair fails to look within. o