Vanity Fair (2004)

  I remember seeing this when it first came out.  I was working night shift so I was up at very odd hours and it was like the 9:30 showing on a Tuesday.  I remember very vividly because the guy at the ticket booth told me to enjoy my private screening because I was the only one who had bought a ticket for that showing.  I had the entire theater to myself and it was utterly marvelous.  As an autistic person, the sense of relief to not have to be constantly on guard or aware of the presence of others was so heady.  I vowed that if I ever got Real Money, I would only ever buy out theaters for private shows.  (Someone else came in just after the previews started, but I will never forget that first rush.)

And then the pandemic happened and I could stream everything to my living room, which is very nearly as good and much more affordable.

Becky Sharp (Reece Witherspoon) grew up poor but beautiful and clever, three faults for which society has very little forgiveness for in women.  She trained as a governess, learning to be accomplished and useful, and took her first assignment with a country gentleman named Lord Crawley (Bob Hoskins).  Soon, she had caught the eye of Crawley's wealthy sister (Eileen Atkins) as a kind of pet, which introduced her to Rawdon Crawley (James Purefoy), the golden son.  Becky and Rawdon eloped, but still managed to gain begrudging entrance to society based on his name and her insistence.  Her ambitions only grew with each snub and she leveraged everything to finally catch the eye of true nobility in the Marquess of Steyne (Gabriel Byrne).  

The movie is fine.  It's a big, sweeping costume drama based on a classic piece of literature that stars some of the prettiest men to ever be born on the shores of the British Isles.  It is also a frothing love letter to colonialism that scratches the surface of the racism inherent in that. 

As a side note, I wonder now if the Crawley's of Downton Abbey were intended to be descendants of the Crawley's of Queen's Crawley, since Julian Fellowes was a screenwriter for this movie and creator of Downton Abbey.  I kind of like that as a head canon if it's not true.  And I'm too lazy to look up if it is.

It's streaming on Peacock.