Waste of time

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

I didn't read the book before watching this film. Still after going through the 2 hours I can say that this film looks beautiful with exquisite period costumes and settings but the main characters don't come to life. The film concentrates on the exploits of Becky, a girl coming from a poor family climbs her way through the social ladder. As interpreted by Reese Witherspoon or as written on script, Becky's character feels flat and unnatural and so much is hinged on this character in the film. Either Reese was out of her depths in this or the director/script writers didn't get the feel of how a conniving, calculating but bewitching person could be. or feel. Rosella O Hara in Gone with the Wind springs to mind and VIvian Leigh nailed down the part. That made the whole film spring to life despite the many goings and comings of different characters. Unfortunately Vanity Fair fails in this and most of the characters have a disposable feel to them with a few exceptions The film still stuns in the visual department with the rich costumes, interiors, colours and delightful gardens being shown. That I enjoyed

William Makepeace Thackeray's novel "Vanity Fair" is a satire telling of the rise, fall and rise again of the social-climbing adventuress Becky Sharp. Like a number of other literary heroines from this period, most notably Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Becky starts life as a governess, although she and Jane Eyre are completely different in character. Whereas Jane is morally upright and deeply religious, Becky is scheming and unscrupulous. (Her surname has an obvious symbolic meaning). She marries Rawdon Crawley, an Army officer and the younger son of her employer, becomes the mistress of the wealthy Lord Steyne and, after various reverses of fortune, ends up as the wife of a senior official with the East India Company.Thackeray's title is taken from Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" and refers to a fair which was intended to symbolise man's sinful attachment to the things of this world. His intention was to satirise the snobbishness, hypocrisy and worldliness of British society. Although the events described in the novel take place in the 1810s and 1820s, two or three decades before it was published in 1848, he clearly intended it to have a contemporary relevance, and his readers would have had no difficulty identifying the Becky Sharps and Lord Steynes of their own day.The author described it as a "novel without a hero", and few, if any, of its characters are intended to come across as sympathetic. We may admire Becky's cunning and determination, but her ruthlessness and amorality mark her out as the novel's anti-heroine rather than its heroine. Her husband Rawdon is as amoral as her, and considerably more stupid. Steyne (pronounced "stain"- another symbolic name) is a libertine and a bully. Rawdon's father Sir Pitt Crawley is an oafish vulgarian and his brother Pitt junior a pompous prig. Becky's friend Amelia Sedley is, unlike Becky herself, morally upright, but is also rather dull, lacking in intelligence and a poor judge of character. She persists, for example, in believing, in the teeth of all the evidence, that her rakish fiancé George Osborne, who later becomes her husband, is a paragon of virtue.The novel has been the subject of numerous television and film adaptations, although this is the only one I have seen apart from the British television version from the late eighties. That adaptation kept to Thackeray's plot reasonably faithfully, but scriptwriter Julian Fellowes and director Mira Nair evidently thought that that plot would not work on the big screen because they made a number of changes, most notably to the character of Becky, who becomes far more sympathetic than she was in the original. (There was, apparently, an earlier discarded screenplay in which Becky's character was closer to the way she is depicted in the novel). The character of her husband Rawdon is also somewhat sanitised, and even Steyne at first seems more like a kindly benefactor than a sexual predator. It is only at the end that he reveals himself in his true colours.No film based upon a novel, especially a novel as complex as "Vanity Fair", can ever be 100% faithful to the original, and a number of literary adaptations have been highly successful films in their own right despite departing considerably from their source material. This, however, is not really one of them. If you want to make a film about a feisty young proto-feminist in the Regency era- which is how Fellowes paints Becky- I would not really recommend using Thackeray's novel as a starting-point. Deprived of much of its satirical content, "Vanity Fair" becomes emasculated, just another "heritage cinema" British costume drama.Yet this is not entirely a bad film. Reese Witherspoon makes Becky into an appealing heroine, and cannot be held personally to blame for the fact that the character she is playing is far from being the one that Thackeray created. Her British accent is perhaps not 100% reliable, but this is not so important in period drama, as we do not know exactly how people spoke in the early nineteenth-century, and the difference between British and American accents may have been less marked than it is today. There are also some good performances in cameo roles from the likes of Bob Hoskins as the uncouth Sir Pitt and Eileen Atkins as his wealthy and autocratic sister Miss Matilda.Another attractive feature is the visual look of the film. Nair was clearly aiming to reproduce the look of an Old Master painting, and does this by the use of strong, vivid colours, especially reds and greens, shot through a filter which gives a slightly yellow tint, like a picture seem through a protective layer of varnish. I felt, however, that this is a film which could have been improved had it followed the original novel more closely. 6/10

Yes, ''Vanity Fair'' is a good movie, but sadly it's not very much faithful to the novel, which is one of my favorite novels.Just see the differences: are there any similarities between the Becky of the novel and the Becky of the movie? In the novel, we start to hate Becky Sharp. Again in the novel, Becky is presented with a selfish and wicked character, a character WITHOUT a soul. But in the movie--- she has emotions and she is a good person despite her wicked dreams.If you don't read the novel but only watch the movie, then you will like this movie. In fact, I also like this movie very much, but I'm sad because of it's lack of faithfulness towards the novel.And now, the songs are truly wonderful. Take an example of ''Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal'' and ''She Walks in Beauty''. Aren't these songs wonderful? The musical effects of the film is very good.And the casting: it's excellent!!! I like the performances of all of them: Reese Witherspoon, James Purefoy, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Romola Garai, Rhys Ifans, Bob Hoskins, Gabriel Byrne, Jim Broadbent and others.In short, the whole movie is good but is not much faithful to the novel. Yes, it's faithful, but some elements in the movie truly disappointed me.

Great old books are quite a challenge to bring to the big screen because they were simply written on a different level than today's popular fiction. Vanity Fair is a great example of that.Becky Sharp (Reese Witherspoon) is a young woman from an impoverished family who lost her mother when she was just a child. After slaving away many years at a boarding school, she finally gets a job as governess to one of those pinched English families in the early 19th century that had neither enough nobility nor enough money to be thoroughly upper class. From there Becky latches on to a rich dowager, before marrying the dowager's soldier nephew. Meanwhile, Becky's best friend Amelia (Romola Garai) is hopelessly in love with an arrogant jerk who cares little for her but whose father cares a great deal for Amelia's family fortune. When that fortune disappears, the father forbids the marriage to Amelia but the son goes through with it anyway, for no apparent reason. Becky and Amelia follow their husbands to Europe as the men prepare to war against Napoleon, where Becky becomes the toast of the night life of the British expeditionary force. The war ends with Amelia's husband dead and Becky and her husband trying to make a name for themselves in London society, racking up huge debts in doing so. That brings in the Marquis of Steyne (Gabriel Byrne), who sets his sights on Becky and tempts her with everything she's ever desired from life. But getting everything she ever wanted turns out to be far more than Becky can handle.There's a lot more than that in the film (and even more in the book), but that's the major problem with Vanity Fair. There's just too much story in too little time, leaving none of it with a chance to breathe. Take Reese Witherspoon's performance, for example. Her Becky is tough and determined, but the story is so busy moving her from place to place that we get no sense of her ambition and lust for status. She's called a "mountaineer" of social climbing, but most of her advancement in the first half of the film are due more to chance and circumstance than any effort of Becky's. By the time her more grasping nature has a chance to unfold on screen, it seems out of place and forced. Or take Amelia's beloved George (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). He's such a jackass it's hard to understand Amelia's devotion and then George makes decisions that are completely counter to his jackass nature without explanation. In a book, you can find the verbiage to justify or cover up stuff like that which makes little to no sense. But on screen, you just get what you can see.This is a common problem with books like Vanity Fair, which may have been pop culture in their day but played to audiences that were much smaller but much more literate than we have today. While a contemporary novel might be a cheeseburger, good but aimed at the common taste buds, Vanity Fair is more like a steak prepared by a French chef, tasty but perhaps too expensive or too much of a bother for many.The film does look great and the actors uniformly do a fine job. The best thing about the movie, however, is how it crystalizes the social and economic prison people found themselves locked inside in the early 19th century. If you didn't have money and status, your life would be nasty, brutish and usually short. I f you had money but not status, you found yourself on the outside of acceptable society trying desperately to get in. If you had status but no money, you found yourself a helpless pawn in the social gameplaying of those had money. And whatever it is that you happened to lack, there were only a very few and limited ways to try and fix that deficiency.As a work of entertainment, you're probably better off reading the book. But as an example of the structure of British society at a particular point in time, such as a teacher might use to give students a clearer understanding of those realities, Vanity Fair is worth your while.