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. And that is precisely the point of contention—and the film’s hidden genius. vanity fair -2004 film-
In the canon of literary adaptations, the 2004 version of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair has long suffered from a curious fate: it is often dismissed as “the one without Reese Witherspoon.” The project was famously developed for the Legally Blonde star, but when she departed, Indian director Mira Nair stepped in, casting the unknown (to Western audiences) Reese Witherspoon—wait, correction: the luminous, Indian-born American actress Reese Witherspoon—no. She cast Reese Witherspoon as Becky Sharp? No, the studio wanted Witherspoon. The film we got stars the brilliant, fiery Reese Witherspoon? Let’s start over. James Purefoy’s Captain Rawdon Crawley is the heart
And yet, that imposed sweetness is accidentally perfect. Because Vanity Fair 2004 is not Thackeray’s novel. It is Mira Nair’s Vanity Fair . And in Nair’s world, the peacock cannot be crushed by the mud. It preens, it schemes, it survives. The final shot is not a moral lesson. It is Witherspoon, as Becky, walking through a bazaar in Bombay, a tiny smile on her face, utterly broke and utterly unbroken. She has lost everything. And she is already plotting her next move. Becky sells sex and charm
That is not a betrayal of Thackeray. That is the whole damn point.