Posted by Ed
Last night, as I finished watching Mira Nair's new adaptation of Vanity Fair, I was surprised to see the following film credit: "Salaams to Edward W. Said for continuing to inspire." One doesn't usually expect to see a post-colonial theorist thanked by the makers of a Holloywood movie...
Then again, the movie probably would have been better if Mira Nair weren't quite so interested in Orientalist critiques of colonialism. Nair's Vanity Fair had several India-inspired scenes that--I'm told--did not appear in the book, and whose presence, I felt, was jarring; in one scene, Becky Sharp performs an Indian dance number for King George IV, and in another, she tours India with Joseph Sedley on an elephant.
Overall, the movie was decent but uninspired: the acting was pretty good, the music was excellent, and the script included some great lines and amusing scenes, but the movie as a whole just didn't have much bite. My sense is that Becky Sharp should have been nastier, and I felt like her character ended up muddled by Nair's attempt to make her more straightforwardly likeable. Then again, who am I to judge? I've never read the book... (One of the joys of reading reviews of Vanity Fair is watching movie critics who've obviously never read the book fall over themselves trying to look like Thackeray experts.)
Update: According to this Globe and Mail article, Mira Nair was once Said's next-door neighbor.
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Posted by: Personal Injury Lawyers at January 23, 2005 08:26 AM