AT THE MOVIES WITH KASEY BUTCHER
Sometimes I just get the urge to watch a really girly movie. I mean a movie with all the pretty dresses, makeup, hair, dancing, cute boys, the whole lot of prissy, filly, feminine features. I’m looking for the kind of movie that my boyfriend will refuse to watch. I got the craving last weekend, so my best gal pals and I went out to see Vanity Fair.
Vanity Fair, based upon the classic novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, features Reese Witherspoon (Legally Blonde) as Becky Sharp, a poor young governess climbing her way up the ladder of nineteenth century English society and sacrificing love, respect, and friendship along the way. Sharp, like other favorite female characters, is charming, witty, beautiful, and coquettishly evil. Somehow she is so slick and so falsely naïve that her wrongdoing is almost forgivable.
Becky, the daughter of an English painter and a French opera singer spends her adolescence in a girls’ school in which she works as a servant to earn her keep. Upon graduation, she heads to the boondocks to work as a governess in a laughably dilapidated household. She is not there for long, however, before she charms her master’s wealthy half-sister, Lady Crawley (Meg Wynn Owen, Love Actually), and is swept away to London where she is kept as somewhat of a pet by the old woman. Becky is soon to find out that wealthy old women may talk romance, but act rationally when she elopes with Lady Cawley’s favorite nephew, Rawdon (James Purefoy, Blessed), and the two are promptly cut out of her will. As Becky works hard to both make ends meet and claw her way to high society, she is forced to learn the hard way about the deception, cruelty, and vanity that comes with the wealthy.
Vanity Fair is a beautiful movie. The makeup and costumes are gorgeous. It was two hours of pure eye-candy. Strangely, this prettiness is accompanied by a very unpretty story. It is remarkable how “high-society” can act so low. The story, as good as it is, lacks a certain punch. It is hard to sympathize with the characters.
I believe that this problem can largely be attributed to casting. Reese Witherspoon is a talented actress, but for some reason she did not seem to sink into the character of Becky Sharp. I did not feel as though I were watching a movie about Becky so much as I felt I was watching a movie about Reese. The failure of believing the lead role then spread to the other supporting roles. The best performances were given by actors in small, comedic parts, such as the Crawley family. As pretty and interesting as the images in the movie were, they could not compensate for the detachment from the story that I felt.
Overall, Vanity Fair was a fairly good “girls’ night out movie.” It had pretty clothes, cute boys, and a very feminine plot. If only the acting had been better.
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