Vanity Fair

When William Makepeace Thackeray created Becky Sharp, the scheming, thoroughly amoral antiheroine of his savage, 1848 satirical masterpiece, Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero, he could have had Reese Witherspoon in mind: Who else could play a young woman who combines the ruthless ambition of a Tracy Flick (ELECTION) and the butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her-mouth sweetness of Elle Woods (LEGALLY BLONDE)? It comes as a huge disappointment, then, that having cast Witherspoon as Miss Sharp, director Mira Nair and Oscar-winning screenwriter Julian Fellowes (GOSFORD PARK) were unable to resist that impulse to find 21st-century prototypes in 19th-century literary charac...