Word: thackeray
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...With a $23 million budget and cast that includes Bob Hoskins and Gabriel Byrne, Nair's adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair is her biggest film yet. Reese Witherspoon plays Becky Sharp, the 1820s London social climber who set the bar by which such mountaineers would forever after be measured. The buzz is all about how Nair has played up Thackeray's Indian influences?he was born in Calcutta?including a Bollywood dance number and an ending shot in the Rajasthani fort town of Jodhpur. The New York Times griped about the "outlandish" sight of Witherspoon doing...
...recognize Becky Sharp. Ever since William Makepeace Thackeray created her more than 150 years ago, she has been the universally recognized embodiment of the social climber, in her case trying to rise out of poverty to a respectable position in a society?Georgian England?more rigidly stratified than any we know. In that delicately poised world, speaking the wrong word, using the wrong fork, could mean disaster, and the suspense in Vanity Fair derives largely from our anxious observation of Becky navigating a vast sea of swells...
...least because we have all been in her position, desperate to impress our betters. Moreover, director Mira Nair has created a pretty panorama?populated with solid actors like Bob Hoskins and Gabriel Byrne?of English life in the Georgian era for Becky to master. It is more exotic than Thackeray's, more laden with the booty of a burgeoning colonial empire, but Nair, Indian by birth, is entitled to her opinions about the exploitations on which England's wealth was based...
...suit against a director who had used a double for a nude scene in her film Ek Chhoti Si Love Story. Last month, she lost the case. So she sought help from another powerful gang in Bombay: the Hindu chauvinist Shiv Sena political party. Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray considers himself the protector of Hindu culture, even as his boys, like the bhais, win adherents by force. When Love Story was released, Shiv Sena activists attacked the theaters, ripped up billboards and threatened owners to stop screenings of the film. In Bombay, the Mob isn't the only...
...demigod family had the unthinkable wealth and size to inspire story-tellers. In one of Disraeli's novels a character named St Barbe--a caricature of Thackeray--holds forth in praise of his hosts at an extravagant Rothschild-style dinner: "What a family this is! I had no idea of wealth before! Did you observe the silver plates?" The Rothschilds, however, considered such hospitality an unpleasant duty. Nathan complained to his brothers in 1843, "Here we have stinking balls night after night. You have no idea how sweaty the old French ladies smell after a long waltz...