The 2004 Vanity Fair stars as Becky Sharp. And that is precisely the point of contention—and the film’s hidden genius.
At first glance, Witherspoon seems miscast. Thackeray’s Becky is a cunning, amoral social climber, a dark-haired, dark-eyed Frenchified orphan with a viper’s wit. Witherspoon, with her sunny, all-American cheerleader aura and honeyed Southern charm, feels like she wandered in from a different movie. But that dissonance is the trick. Nair understands that the 21st century cannot stomach a villainess; it can only root for a survivor. By giving Becky the face of America’s sweetheart, Nair performs a radical act: she makes us fall in love with a sociopath. Nair, best known for Monsoon Wedding , does something even more controversial. She refuses to bow to the Merchant-Ivory template of powdered wigs and pastoral silence. Her England is not a museum; it’s a bazaar. The soundtrack bleeds into sarangi and tabla. The Battle of Waterloo is seen not as a glorious cavalry charge, but as a muddy, chaotic, horrifically loud nightmare. And in the film’s most audacious sequence, Becky—disgraced and penniless—winds up in a fantastical, jewel-toned court in India, dancing in a haze of opium and silk. vanity fair -2004 film-
James Purefoy’s Captain Rawdon Crawley is the heart of the film—a gloriously dumb, tender man-boy destroyed by the system he serves. And Gabriel Byrne’s Marquess of Steyne is not a cartoon villain but a lonely, powerful predator. Their scenes with Becky crackle with a dangerous truth: everyone is selling something. Becky sells sex and charm. Steyne sells access. Rawdon sells his honor. The only difference is the price tag. The film is not perfect. It is too long and too short simultaneously; the final act feels rushed, compressing years of novelistic decay into a montage. Witherspoon, for all her ferocity, cannot fully shed her rom-com tics—a plucky head-tilt here, a determined pout there—that soften Becky’s edges. And the studio’s insistence on a happy ending (an epilogue where Becky reunites with her son in India, a scene Nair fought to keep ambiguous) betrays Thackeray’s cold final line: “Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.” The 2004 Vanity Fair stars as Becky Sharp