Vanity Fair, the new movie

Cafe Society
1

I see they’re trying to make Vanity Fair into a movie again. Is there any advance buzz on the quality of this attempt? It’s one of my favorite books of all time, but I can see how it would be extremely difficult to film, what with the several plots and dozens of characters. Also, the trailer I saw seemed to be trying to show Becky Sharp as a sympathetic, admirable character. Anyone who has read the book knows that VF is “A Novel Without A Hero”, and that Becky is anything but sympathetic or admirable. So I’m suspicious right off the bat.

Anybody heard anything?

2

You know - I was thinking the same thing. I was actually planning on re-reading the book before I went to see the movie so I could more easily compare the two.

3

The buzz at rottentomatoes.com seems to be that the movie’s a disappointment. So far, I’ve heard that it’s kinda incoherent and has some tributes to Indian culture thrown in that make no sense in a movie about English culture. There are also some jabs that Reese Witherspoon isn’t very capable in a period piece. I’ll still see it to form my own opinion though.

4

I had an opportunity to see an advance screening a couple of weeks ago, but it was a zoo and I didn’t get in. (Lots of teenage girls milling about, no doubt as a result of their enduring interest in Reese’s pieces.) (I am so sorry.) (No I’m not.) (Well, a little.)

The director of the film is Mira Nair, who I like and respect (I thought Monsoon Wedding was one of the best films of last year, for example). I’ll see it on that basis alone.

And re the trailers, remember that marketers try to sell Reliable Themes to Mainstream Audiences in order to maximize revenue. Sometimes it means the movie is, in fact, typical pap and easily reducible to the necessary ad format. And sometimes it means a more challenging movie has to be misleadingly marketed and squeezed and tortured into a sellable formula. They may be taking things out of context in order to draw in the Average Viewer who isn’t (yet) comfortable with the thought of Reese playing anything but the sympathetic ingenue. I don’t know, I haven’t seen the movie yet. But it happens. (Look at the advertising for Three Kings a few years ago, for example. It’s pretty clear the marketing department didn’t have a clue how to sell that movie to the public, which is a big part of why it failed at the box office.)

5

I coincidentally started reading the book a few weeks ago; it had always been on my list and I came across a free copy. So I’ve been peripherally following news of the movie. The NYTimes has a long article about its making, and it sounds intriguing (script by the guy who wrote Gosford Park, e.g.). Nair approached it from a modern standpoint, and figured that a woman with no resources, of the “wrong” class, using her wits to “make good,” would be much more sympathetic to a 21st century audience than to a 19th century audience. So she approached the story from that angle. So yes, the character is treated more sympathetically, to make the story more relevant to a modern audience. After all, to condemn a woman for that behavior would be horribly anachronistic today.

6

How so, lissener? I’m also reading the book, and while I agree, the snobbish attitudes that were ripe at the time it was written are pretty much “gone with the wind”, Becky doesn’t strike me as someone I’d like or admire.

Is it just me, or is this movie being marketed as a drama? I believe it’s SUPPOSED to be a comedy!

7

I’ve seen the trailer on TV. Amelia was at least an important character in the book as Becky – but the trailer gives no hint she’s in the movie at all. The trailer does show Becky riding an elephant in India – and in the book she never goes there. Nobody does but Joe Sedley, and that’s just back-story – none of the book’s scenes are set in India. So I’m not optimistic.

8

Ahem, Major Dobbins also goes to India, and some scenes are set in India.-

9

I’m looking forward to seeing this film, but from the trailer I saw, it does look like they’re going for a Becky-as-heroine slant on things, so I’m not going to get my hopes too high.

With the exception of the mid-'80’s mini-series version with Eve Matheson as Becky, I’ve been disappointed in every attempt at Vanity Fair I’ve seen. Usually because they change the ending; you can’t have a sympathetic Becky and keep the end of the novel as it is.

Spoilers for those who haven’t finished reading it:

At the end, Becky is under the “protection” of Jos Sedley, whom she coddles as a helpless invalid, “through a series of unheard-of illnesses,” until his death. It turns out he has a hefty life insurance policy, leaving a thousand pounds to her. Thackeray doesn’t come right out and say she murdered him, but it’s fairly obvious.

10

The director is Indian; she says in the NYTimes article that she did add a little emphasis to the Indian segments of the book.

11

While I agree that Becky’s efforts at social-climbing and bettering herself through her wits would be hard to look down upon today, I’d like to point out a few other things about her that will be hard to depict sympathetically:

[spoiler]She flirts needlessly and cruelly with Amelia’s husband and nearly breaks Amelia’s heart.

She sends her own husband off to war without a tear. She’s more concerned with totting up the worth of all his belongings in anticipation of his getting killed.

She completely neglects and rejects her own son because he may get in the way of her social climbing and her extramarital affair.

She causes her husband to be thrown into a debtor’s jail so that she can pursue her affair with Lord Steyne without fear of detection.

She runs up large debts with several tradesmen and her own servants, knowing she can’t pay, and as a result causes some of them to go bankrupt.[/spoiler]

Now, despite all this, I still find Becky the most enjoyable character in the book. She’s smart and witty and a risk-taker, while most of the other characters are stupid, misguided and dull. But I still maintain she’s far from admirable, even by today’s standards.

12

Agreed that as a character she’s wonderful. As someone to read about, she’s fascinating. Her part of the story is much more interesting than Amelia’s, since Becky actually does things; from the moment we meet her, she is determined to better her position, and she does so using simply her wits, her charm, and her beauty. Amelia, on the other hand, is such an utterly passive victim of fate that she makes Melanie Wilkes look tough.

As a person? Becky is no one I would want to be anywhere near in real life.

13

Most of the best comic moments and punchlines in the book are provided by the narrative voice. When you get right down to it, merely reading through the dailogue scenes involving the main characters would not give too much comedy material, though there are few good scenes. As far as whether it’s intended to be a comedy that’s really tough to say. If you analyze the evidence, it seems that Thackeray’s goals changed as he was writing the book. He started out intending it as a farce, but it became a more serious work as he went along.

14

Slight hijack-but actually, when it got right down to it, Melanie COULD be tough when she had to be. She was the one who stood up for Scarlett, facing the scorn of those she loved (even though we know that Scarlett didn’t deserve it). She was the only one who would talk to Belle Watling, or Rhett Butler. She was the one who helped Scarlett conceal the murder of the deserter who tries to rob them.
No, she’s not as interesting as Scarlett, but when it came to what she felt was right, she wouldn’t back down.
She wasn’t a passive little wimp, but she was weak, in that she was too kind-hearted, modest, and physically weak.

Hijack over-you got Amelia right. She’s someone you’d be more sympathetic too, although her fussing over her son makes me want to smack her.

I’m up to chapter LII (52? Roman numerals were never my strong point) “In Which Lord Steyne Shows Himself In A Most Amiable Light”

Her family’s about to go bankrupt, they barely have enough to eat, so she goes out, selling a shawl, doing handiwork, anything to make money…to buy her son a new fancy outfit for Christmas and books. Not because he NEEDS these things, but because when she tells him they won’t be able to afford it, he starts whining that she promised. Now, I’m all for books, but when it’s a Christmas present she can’t afford, and the little brat throws a fit, forget it! Then she spends all her time weeping over a man who, from what I can recall, wasn’t worth it.

Whereas Becky while a selfish, heartless bitch…

attracted me right away in the first part, where she throws the book out of the carriage. Yeah, she’s a bitch-even worse than Scarlett, I’d say. But she’s sooo wicked, and so horrible, it’s so entertaining.

As for Amelia being in the movie…

There’s one part where a man says to his son, “I won’t have you marrying a beggarmaid!”, which was almost word for word what Mr. Osbourne told George after learning that Amelia’s father was now penniless.

15

This is why I love this place. Where elese can you discuss this kind of things.
I have mixed feelings about the movie. I would love to see if the way I imagined the characters will match the directors vision.
On the other hand adaptations are never easy. In this case it is, in my view, almost impossible for the simpel reason that the most important character is no other than the author himself. Erase the narrator and you kill this novel.
The same happens with other major english works such as my all time favourite “Barchester Towers”.
In conclussion it will be fun to watch but it won’t make laugh or cry as the book has done so many times (my favourite scene that should be read aloud, as a lesson, in every classroom is old Sedleys death… simply magnificent).-

16

I just saw the television commercial for this tonight. It struck me as Luhrman does Thackeray, actually. Which made me shudder for a good ten minutes.

17

I just got an image of Jim Broadbent as the puppetmaster.*

*Not Andre Toulon, but the Manager from VF.

18

I’m reviving this old thread rather than starting a new one, since I’ve just seen the new VF movie, and have answers to some of the questions raised here.

(Spoilers below, and I’m only going to hide the crucial ones).

First off, Becky is very sympathetically portrayed in this movie. She shows signs of genuinely caring for her husband, her child, and Amelia, so of course several of the key incidents in her life have been significantly changed: During the battle of Waterloo, she stays behind in Brussels to stay with Amelia (Jos is oddly not there, and Becky sells her horse to someone else), and the two women have a tender, sisterly little scene rather than quarrel over George. There is a little bit of a quarrel over George dancing with Becky just before the men go off to the battle, but it’s over quickly, and does not divide the two for years. Also, when Rawdon finds her with Lord Steyne, and she tells him she is innocent, she is.

There is an added-on subplot in which Lord Steyne is a collector of Becky’s father’s paintings; the movie begins with him purchasing a portrait of Becky’s mother when Becky is a little girl, and we see glimpses of him now and again in the early parts of the movie, as if he’s keeping an eye on her before he officially comes into the story.

The ending of the story is dramatically changed:

Jos and Becky go off to India. The last thing we see is the two of them riding happily on an elephant.

Considering how many characters and events the film has to get through, they had to compress it quite a lot to get it all into 2 1/4 hours, and there are some odd gaps in the narrative. I could fill in the gaps for myself, but I’d like to hear from someone who isn’t as familiar with the book to see if some of the plot points were hard for them to follow. Also, the Bute Crawleys are missing (Mrs. Bute’s activities against Rebecca are taken by Lady Southdown), Miss Briggs is absent, and George Osbourne only has one sister. Nobody goes to Brighton, or Paris, or to Brussels at the very end, and those parts of the story are either skipped over, or take place elsewhere. A lot of subtlety is lost, and characters often come right out and say things that are more understated in the book–I think this is also a issue of compression.

The scene that touched me most was one from the book, but which I don’t think has been included in any other film or TV version I’ve seen: when Becky is invited to Gaunt House, the ladies ostentatiously snub her until Lady Steyne takes pity on her and asks her to sing. Becky’s singing moves the Lady to tears.

The scene that amused me most, unintentionally, was also a musical number. Instead of the charades, where Becky dresses in 18th-century costume and sings “The Rose upon my Balcony,” she and some of the other ladies dress up in Indian-style outfits and do a dance rather like Nicole Kidman’s reprise of “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” in Moulin Rouge.

19

Ugh. Now I know I don’t want to see this movie.

Which is funny, because I read the book because I wanted to see the movie-I figured I’d read the book first.

And now that I’ve read the book, the movie sounds like it would suck!

20

I haven’t read the novel, but I certainly enjoyed Miraim Hopkins as Becky in the 1935 version (the first feature in full color). Anyone else see it?