The theatrette quickly emptied, as they tend to after long films, and I found myself sitting alone as the credits rolled. The projectionist came out of his booth and began closing-up. I asked him what he thought of the film. He replied, "about twenty minutes too long", then added, "most movies are..." As I wandered down George Street back to Town Hall station I was thinking about the projectionist’s comment. What does it mean to say that a film is too long? What causes the feeling that a film has overstayed its welcome on the screen? In dealing with a cinematic adaptation of a work such as William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero (1847-1848) one problem a filmmaker must deal with is the unfamiliarity of the world he or she is recreating for a contemporary audience. This unfamiliarity is both psychological and physical. Director Mira Nair begins with the assumption that for Thackeray’s story to work on a contemporary audience we must be able to enter into these characters’ lives and feel at home in the world they inhabit. I’ll return to this assumption in a moment, but the strategy she adopts is to inject Thackeray’s world with a modern psychology and to shift Thackeray’s interest in a character’s dissatisfaction with their position in a fixed and sharply hierarchical social structure, to a focus on romance. In other words, Nair keeps the settings, customs, and dress of 19th century England as a kind of stylish exterior through which she can express the central character’s journey towards an awareness of her need for love. There’s no doubt that Nair’s attempts to turn Vanity Fair into a romance is at constant odds with the source material, and I think that it is this displacement of Thackeray’s focus which generates the feeling that this film drags a little. Modern romance, especially in its mainstream cinematic representations, has an intrinsically emotional impulsive rhythm, qualities that do not synch well with a story constructed, on the one hand, as an examination of English society, and on the other, as a study of the rise and consequent fall of someone through this society’s fixed hierarchical structure. Both the scope and focus of Thackeray’s narrative demand time to unfold. Paradoxically, it is Nair’s attempt to simply ignore the fact that a precise, slow, step-by-step movement is intrinsic to Thackeray’s story that makes us aware of this very element. In Nair’s romanticized version of Vanity Fair the central protagonist’s slow rise through English society is felt as a rather torturous detour on her emotional journey towards true love. [If you want to see a film in which Thackeray’s demand for time and a slow stately pace is recognized watch Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Thackeray’s The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. (1844). Kubrick does not begin with Nair’s conventional assumption that viewers must be able to enter into the narrative and identify with the characters’ psychology. Instead of attempting to make the unfamiliarity of Thackeray’s world familiar by modernizing its psychological basis, Kubrick respects and utilizes its alienness by never allowing us to enter into it, but rather forcing us to watch it from a distance. Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) does not create a simple narrative concerning individuals, their ambitions and their downfall, but rather allows us to view, as if from a height, the structure of the society itself and the slow implacable movement of the social forces which surround the characters ambitions and carry them along.]

In Vanity Fair Becky Sharp (Reese Witherspoon) is an ambitious, sharp-tongued, quick-witted girl who refuses to let her lowly birth prevent her from entering the upper echelons of English society and thereby living a life of status, that is, a life of wealth, luxury, and decadent indulgence. We follow Becky’s life from her placement in an orphanage following the death of her parents through a series of social elevations and suitors. Through Becky’s adventures and misadventures the elegant, courteous, refined lifestyle of the English aristocracy is revealed as a façade concealing every kind of deceit, vanity, trickery, foolishness, immorality, pretentiousness and selfishness. It is a society where social status and money dictate every thought, every action and every decision. More importantly, it is a society where the amount of money you have, and the amount of money you lavishly squander on garden parties with endless food, exotic wonders from the Far East, topiary gardens and afternoon soirees, dictates how other people treat you, which is to say, it dictates whether they look up to you and seek out your company, or whether they look down on you and regard you with contempt. But whereas this hierarchical property of society was essential to Thackeray’s study of his character’s ambitions and the course of their lives, Nair opts for a simpler message: love conquers all. That is, when Becky’s fortunes and respect have been won and lost, love is the one thing that remains, and it is revealed as the skeleton-key to personal fulfillment. Nair’s reduction of Thackeray’s themes to a predictable modern emotional stereotype only renders Becky’s rise and fall as rather torturous, dull, clichéd, trivial, and as it would seem, twenty minutes too long. In Thackeray’s hands these were themes that served as a symbol of the vanity and vain strivings of all humankind.