Not, please be advised, a throbbing exposé of life at a trendy New York monthly, but just the latest screen treatment of the William Makepeace Thackeray warhorse, a grand-scale pageant of class, snobbery, and hypocrisy in early 19th-century England. As Classics Illustrated go, the illustrations are supremely fussy, cluttered, glutted; and the Bhubaneshwar-born director, Mira Nair, manages to bring out more Indian flavors than you would have thought possible or desirable. The large cast displays that familiar, team-oriented British proficiency, excepting only Reese Witherspoon, the lone Yank, lightly accented, and proficient in a more sharklike way, as the resilient Becky Sharp, the undeniable heroine of this "novel without a hero." Of the rest -- Jim Broadbent, Bob Hoskins, Gabriel Byrne, Romola Garai, James Purefoy, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, and others -- Eileen Atkins in particular does some delightful work with some delightful lines ("I had thought she was a social climber. I see now she's a mountaineer!"), and Rhys Ifans is quite touching as the doggishly loyal Dobbin. It would be no small feat, however, to extract a strong narrative line from the seven or eight hundred pages of the book, and the feat of the filmmakers is indeed a small one. Years pass, matches are made, births and deaths occur, and the social climb is long and slow and not always uphill. In the course of time (two and a quarter hours), the show goes by, though not without a silent wish for someone to crack the whip. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd
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