The Vanity of Vanity

Goldman wrote those words before it became fashionable for certain movie stars to take the part of a super-villain every now and then, just to mix it up a bit. But for some, Goldman’s rule still applies. Case in point: Reese Witherspoon.

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. Her character, Tracy Flick, will do or say just about anything to become class president. Election was a critical success but a box-office flop. 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.

Now Witherspoon is “bankable,” which means she can get movies made that otherwise nobody would think of spending good money on. Such is the case with her latest film, a cinematic rendering of William Makepeace Thackeray’s classic Victorian novel, the 1847 Vanity Fair. The movie would never have seen the light of day without Witherspoon’s name above the title.

You might think Witherspoon was born to play Vanity Fair‘s protagonist, Becky Sharp. 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. (She is an American, but she does a creditable English accent.) Witherspoon’s mother called her “Little Miss Type A” when she was a child, a description that certainly fits Becky. 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.

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

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.” So, in this film version, Becky may be harsh, may be cruel, may be ambitious, but she is not a villain. Indeed, the movie ends not with Becky killing Joseph Sedley, but with Becky happily married to Joseph Sedley. We last see her happily riding on an elephant in India as friendly natives shower her with rose petals.

Thackeray may have ended his novel with some of the bleakest concluding sentences ever written: “Ah! Vanitas vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? Or, having it, is satisfied? Come, children, let us shut up the box and puppets, for our play is played out.” 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). So they transmute the Machiavellian murderess into a happy bride enjoying the multicultural pleasures of the Raj. It’s as if Fatal Attraction came to a close with a musical number.

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. Her Becky is no longer a faithless wife to her husband Rawdon, but is instead his little sex kitten. 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. Her Becky doesn’t drip with contempt for Rawdon, but instead weeps in anguish when he leaves her. Her Becky no longer buys things on credit with no intention of paying for them; rather, she criticizes her husband for doing so.

“Attributes like ambition or desire were perceived as wicked then,” Witherspoon says in the current issue of Vanity Fair, the magazine named for the book. “Now they’re not. Becky is a survivor. She’s definitely going to grasp every opportunity that comes her way.” Director Nair echoes her star’s words. “Becky is very resourceful, full of beans, and very much somebody who believes in life,” Nair says. “I’ve tried to make her deeply human.”

So did Thackeray try to “make her deeply human.” The problem for the movie is that Thackeray’s entire point was that humankind is all but worthless. 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.

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. 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.

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.” That is what passes for heroism in Thackeray’s eyes. His Vanity Fair is misogynistic, misanthropic, bitter, and ugly, an enduringly hateful book.

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. But again there’s a problem. The plot of Vanity Fair isn’t the reason the book endures. It’s standard-issue Victorian hash, overstuffed with unrequited love, unfortunate orphans, self-sacrificing mothers, harsh creditors, and wild coincidences. 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. 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.

Perhaps the best example of this unusual quality can be found in Thackeray’s treatment of Amelia Sedley, 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. 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. Thackeray instead makes no bones of his opinion: Amelia is a silly, sentimental fool. She does nothing but lie to herself and cry. 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.”

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

John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.