Vanity Fair

This is one of those classics that I managed to avoid in high school. I haven’t even read the Classics Comix or the Cliffs Notes version, so I came into it knowing nothing at all except the name Becky Sharp. I am informed that the novel is “funny and quietly savage” (Roger Ebert). This film version by Mira Nair is great to look at and has some funny stuff, but it’s basically about a lot of people I didn’t like very much, except for Becky. She does what she has to, but she has a heart. It’s all about class conflict, which isn’t high on my list of interests. And it’s her heart that gets Becky into trouble, marrying a useless fool and gambler. If she’d followed her head more she was smart enough to have cut the legs out from under any of the retarded aristos around her, and ended up the richest woman in London. Like I said, I have no idea how faithful this adaptation is to the novel, but it all seemed sort of pointless, and too long.