The Vanity of Vanity

...In her risky and largely unsuccessful pursuit of social position and wealth, which Thackeray charts over the course of fifteen years, Becky lies, cheats, steals, beats up her own unloved child, destroys a marriage by philandering, and then finally secures herself an annuity by murdering an infirm lover...

...Now they're not...

...We last see her happily riding on an elephant in India as friendly natives shower her with rose petals...

...We all reside in Vanity Fair, a low and detestable place powered by pretension and delusion—as Thackeray expected his readers to understand when he borrowed the title of Vanity Fair from the name of a particularly dismal town through which Christian passes in John Bunyan's 1678 Pilgrim's Progress...

...Thackeray cracks dozens of jokes at the expense of Amelia's tear ducts in the course of his book—even describing her in a startlingly modern fashion as having turned on "the waterworks...

...The movie tells the story well, but who could possibly care...

...I saw Becky as a kind of early feminist," Witherspoon says in her Vanity Fair magazine interview...

...No, people still read Vanity Fair 160 years after its publication because of Thackeray's essayistic and satiric interjections, which deconstruct his own novel even as he is unfolding it...

...Election was a critical success but a box-office flop...

...So, in this film version, Becky may be harsh, may be cruel, may be ambitious, but she is not a villain...

...I've tried to make her deeply human...

...It's as if Fatal Attraction came to a close with a musical number...

...BY JOHN PODHORETZ "Stars will not play weak and they will not play blemished," William Goldman wrote in his seminal 1983 book, Adven^-^-res in the Scre^^ Trade...

...rather, she criticizes her husband for doing so...

...Such is the case with her latest film, a cinematic rendering of William Makepeace Thackeray's classic Victorian novel, the 1847 Vanity Fair...

...Come, children, let us shut up the box and puppets, for our play is played out...

...Nor does literature need friends like Reese Witherspoon, who think little of changing the meaning of great works of art to suit the demands of their stardom...

...Becky has value in her creator's eyes only because she never surrenders to the sentimental or pious illusions that afflict every other character in the novel, particularly her counterpart Amelia...

...The plot of Vanity Fair isn't the reason the book endures...

...movie stars to take the part of a super-villain every now and then, just to mix it up a bit...

...Without Thackeray's bracing and vicious voice reminding us in extraordinarily clever but deeply distressing prose just how rotten everything is, Vanity Fair would be merely a boring and inconclusive tale about unhappy people who don't merit much attention being manipulated by a devious but clever woman...

...She's definitely going to grasp every opportunity that comes her way...

...Her Becky no longer buys things on credit with no intention of paying for them...

...With friends like Reese Witherspoon, who seem to think that women's lib includes murder and child-beating, feminists need no enemies...

...Her Becky doesn't drip with contempt for Rawdon, but instead weeps in anguish when he leaves her...

...She does nothing but lie to herself and cry...

...It is also endless, and it must be said that Nair and her team of screenwriters do an admirable job of condensing the book's plot into a fast-moving 137 minutes...

...Becky is very resourceful, full of beans, and very much somebody who believes in life," Nair says...

...The problem for the movie is that Thackeray's entire point was that humankind is all but worthless...

...Because Reese Witherspoon is a star—and not just a star, but a very young star with two young children and what is, by Hollywood standards, a marriage of long duration (five years)— her Becky doesn't box her son's ears or make jokes about how the boy will have to cry himself to sleep, as Thackeray's Becky does...

...But such bleakness simply won't do for Little Miss Type A, director Mira Nair, and a team of screenwriters that includes Julian Fellowes (who wrote Gosford Park...

...Witherspoon was more than willing in her pre-stardom days to play a social-climbing, power-hungry adventuress in a brilliant 1999 high school satire called Election...

...Vanitas vanitatum...

...Which of us is happy in this world...

...Which of us has his desire...

...The characters, save for Becky, aren't especially memorable...

...Indeed, if plot were all, Vanity Fair would be as little known today as Headlong Hall and Gryll Grange, two far funnier satires by Thomas Love Peacock that were published around the same time as Thackeray's book...

...But again there's a problem...

...Becky is a monster—but she knows it, and her self-knowledge makes her superior to those seemingly noble women in the novel who spend decades mourning husbands who didn't love them, or those seemingly noble men who spend decades pursuing silly women who are unworthy of their affections...

...Thackeray instead makes no bones of his opinion: Amelia is a silly, sentimental fool...

...Her character, Tracy Flick, will do or say just about anything to become class president...

...Or, having it, is satisfied...

...Case in point: Reese Witherspoon...

...Witherspoon's mother called her "Little Miss Type A" when she was a child, a description that certainly fits Becky...

...Though Vanity Fair is subtitled "A Novel Without a Hero," Thackeray does at one point allow Becky to "lay claim to a heroine," because she is "cool and collected in the presence of doubts and difficulties...

...So they transmute the Machiavellian murderess into a happy bride enjoying the multicultural pleasures of the Raj...

...Her Becky isn't caught with her lover, the Marquis of Steyne, but is instead attempting to fight the older man off when her husband comes in and finds them together...

...Try asking a major star to play a real Mafia head, a man who makes his living off whores and child pornography, heroin and blood...

...Indeed, the movie ends not with Becky killing Joseph Sedley, but with Becky happily married to Joseph Sedley...

...Yes, Becky Sharp is one juicy part, and Witherspoon knows it...

...She is an American, but she does a creditable English accent...

...The movie would never have seen the light of day without Witherspoon's name above the title...

...She matches almost exactly Thackeray's description of Becky as "small and slight in person, pale, sandy-haired," with "very large, odd and attractive" eyes...

...His Vanity Fair is misogynistic, misanthropic, bitter, and ugly, an enduringly hateful book...

...And Becky is a logical role for the actress who so fearlessly limned the part of Tracy Flick in Election—for when it comes to soulless conniving, Tracy Flick has nothing on the most soulless conniver in the annals of literature...

...Becky is a survivor...

...Director Nair echoes her star's words...

...Unfortunately, Witherspoon is also a movie star of the old school, and as William Goldman said, movie stars "will not play weak and they will not play blemished...

...Her Becky is no longer a faithless wife to her husband Rawdon, but is instead his little sex kitten...

...Thackeray may have ended his novel with some of the bleakest concluding sentences ever written: "Ah...

...Attributes like ambition or desire were perceived as wicked then," With-erspoon says in the current issue of Vanity Fair, the magazine named for the book...

...But for some, Goldman's rule still applies...

...Witherspoon would only emerge as a bona-fide Hollywood star two years later as the title character in a wretched crowd-pleaser called Legally Blonde, which made $140 million worldwide at the box office...

...sorry folks, those parts go to the character actors, or the has-beens...

...Now Witherspoon is "bankable," which means she can get movies made that otherwise nobody would think of spending good money on...

...Dickens would have made of Amelia what he made of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop: a creature on the cusp of womanhood, so brave and enduring that the only intelligent critical response is to fling the book across the room...

...You might think Witherspoon was born to play Vanity Fair's protagonist, Becky Sharp...

...That is what passes for heroism in Thackeray's eyes...

...So did Thackeray try to "make her deeply human...

...It's standard-issue Victorian hash, overstuffed with unrequited love, unfortunate orphans, self-sacrificing mothers, harsh creditors, and wild coincidences...

...Perhaps the best example of this unusual quality can be found in Thackeray's treatment of Amelia Sed-ley, Becky's only friend...

...In a conventional Victorian novel, Amelia would be a creature of infinite glory, a wondrous example of self-denying womanhood—full of deep feeling and high sentiment, so kind and loving that she is even willing to surrender her beloved son to a rich relative to help provide for her own parents and to secure the boy's future...

...Goldman wrote those words before it became fashionable for certain John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...