A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

The plot is far too condensed for a movie, and this might be the fatal flaw. The dramas of the book were lost in the movie, and the movie is difficult to follow and scenes just jump from one drama to the other. However, the cinematography, costumes, etc, make this a fun movie to watch. For some reason, we in this day and age like to forget about the smell of London in prior centuries, when men and women p'd in the street, or in the halls and/or emptied their p pots in the streets. This movie is no exception. Every scene deserves an award for costumes, and cinematography. The female characters are showing cleavage before the pm...How odd, but fun to watch.

My girlfriend received this movie as a gift years ago. We finally got around to watching it yesterday. We both were very bored by the film and still aren't sure what the point of the film was. Here are our issues.1. The film had no identity. This seemed to be one of those films that was filmed while writing it. It never seemed to have any purpose and even the director and actors seemed to be lost as to what they expected out of this film. Based on the description on IMDb, I assumed this was your standard film about a poor woman trying to find love and success. But never does it seem that way. It appears that this movie is just about a woman with poor upbringings who is fortunate enough to often be part of rich families, bouncing from family to family, to become nothing more than who she was before.2. There is no growth in the characters, personally nor physically. The character played by Gabriel Byrne looks exactly the way he did 30+ years previously. But the big issue is that none of the characters, including the main character, seem to have much of a personal growth, epiphany, nor any substance. There is no compassion, sympathy, hatred, nor memorable features from these characters. They are far too easy to forget. There is no true hero, protagonist, nor antagonist. Anytime you do start to get to know a character, they take off and leave the film for a moment. Often without explanation.3. The film isn't very easy to follow. Often many characters are introduced without any explanation or understanding of how these characters are important to the story. Matter of fact, many of the characters could have and should have been either expanded upon or written out of the movie. One example of these characters are the children. In the movie one of the characters is pregnant. A family offers to help her with her child while her husband is gone. The child is born. Next thing you know another child is presented without explanation. The first child all of a sudden is no longer living with this family because his mother moved back in with his grandparents. But the movie doesn't tell you this. What happened is that the main family in the story also had a child but failed to mention this. So you are confused when this boy is running around with black hair, then blond, then black, then blond..... it's poor writing. Later on in the movie another child shows up and the movie doesn't explain who the father is, yet all the rest of the characters know who he is without explanation. Also, some of the main characters get married out of the blue without any mention until after the fact. Two characters will meet one day, flirt for a few seconds, then be married without any wedding nor any indication that these two are in love.4. The movie doesn't follow any plot structure that I'm aware of. There is no dramatic climax nor anything building up to one. Like I said before, the movie has no purpose.The only good things I can say about this movie is that it looks great and I really liked the costumes. The setting and photography were excellent. It was just wasted on such a poor script.

Satire, aimed at exposing with ridicule serious faults and behaviour that ignore the accepted morals of society, political, commercial and social, was the aim of Thackery. In the film, it would appear from your perspicuous commentator (anhedonia) that the satire has lost its bite. The director Mira Nair, born in Bhubaneshwar in the Orissa State on the East Coast of India somewhere south of Calcutta where Thacheray (1811-63) was born - a state of great historical religious and architectural culture - may have been contaminated by the film industry's quest for profits, in that she modernised the main character in to a more recognizable role. This was unfortunate (anhedonia is clearly right). It is perplexing that Beauty is associated with the exciting, fascinating personalities and the very dubious conduct of the main characters. The Ugly are linked to the money grubbing, speculative and lascivious behaviour of the seemingly successful persons in the English society. There we have a very biting satirical remark of Thackery that Mira Nair underscores. However, its hardly applicable to-day with the awful world of finance operated by good looking greedies. However, Mira Nair, despite the good photography and costumes and sets, seemed to lack the force of her direction that was so pungent in her Indian film Monsoon Wedding. The next Vanity Fair version will hopefully get it right!

None of the reviews I have read thus far would seem to have commented on the music & dance sequence towards the latter part of the film. The sequence depicted 'native' dancers performing an 'ethnic' dance to some equally 'ethnic' music. Both the choreography and the music seemed to draw from a wide variety of styles, i.e. Latin- American, African, Arabic - styles which would simply not have existed in the early 19th century! How on earth could the director have got it so wrong? The sequence was laughable, almost Pythonesque in its absurdity. For me this was the final straw in a piece that had struggled from the start to hold itself together. Even the very talented Miss Witherspoon looked fairly clueless throughout most of the film.