William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1847 novel Vanity Fair is a great read. The story of social climber (or ”mountaineer”, as another character puts it) Becky Sharp, it is a ”novel without a hero”, a dark comedy of social mores, told in a worldly, illusion-free, wickedly observant and very funny voice.
It is also pretty long, covering as it does decades in the lives of its many characters. So it was hard to see how director Mira Nair and scriptwriter Julian Fellowes (of Gosford Park fame) were going to turn Vanity Fair into a movie of reasonable duration. It’s easier to imagine it as one of those six- or eight-part BBC series. Well, it was one, and as recently as 1998 (and, before that, in 1987). It has also been filmed before, but never mind that — Nair was always going to bring a strong personal touch to the material.
She has said, in fact, that part of what attracted her to the novel was its period. As an Indian, she was interested in an era in British history when colonial India was a new, exotic location in the imperial imagination, and a source of rich fabrics and other imports. One of the characters in the novel, Joss Sedley, is in the colonial service in India, and sees himself as some kind of local mini-maharajah. His pretensions in this department are sent up by Thackeray, but Nair seems to regard them with affection.
Nair is certainly not doing what Patricia Rozema did with her 1999 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park — which was to read it via Edward Said and show how all that concern with romances, mores and and money was founded on and made possible by a colonial slave economy. For Nair, India in Vanity Fair is very much what it was to the British empire. It supplies Nair with some of what the movie’s advertising describes as its ”sumptuous” quality (and the movie does look wonderful), and provides an ending unlike the book’s.
But Nair does not entirely soft-pedal Vanity Fair. Yes, inevitably, the narrator’s biting voice is gone, but Nair makes up for it by zipping along with the plot, and that alone says a lot about the characters. Becky (well played by Reese Witherspoon) is not toned down, and Nair allows for an ambivalent response to her selfish charm. The need to squash all that plot into just over two hours begins to seem onerous only towards the finale, when Nair rather shortchanges us on Becky’s one redemptive moment. Doze and you’ll miss it.