A movie may actually turn out better than the source-novel it inspires one to read afterwards, though the reverse -- good books translated into bad celluloid -- is the norm. The two mediums are different, but the usual attempt to jazz up what is good in the first place tends to ruin things and miss the printed point. Then, too, a film cannot catch serious fiction’s concern with point of view, the “voice” of an author or of a narrator who is also a character and therefore limited, obtuse or downright false.

The great English novel form of the nineteenth century was the serial, monthly installments in magazines catering to middle-class families’ reading aloud. In Dickens one can see the seams, episode-ending teasers that, like Universal’s and Republic’s serials of the 'thirties and 'forties, create a readiness to purchase the next number. Dickens freely intruded into his fiction. But it was his friendly rival (they later quarreled), William Mackpeace Thackeray, whom some considered the finer novelist, who avoided the other’s sentimentality and exaggeration and positively gloried in addressing readers and openly manipulating his “famous little Becky Puppet, Amelia Doll, Dobbin Figure and Wicked Nobleman.” Thus, author-creations-readers are a parallel, and powerful, illusion in his Vanity Fair; A Novel Without A Hero.

That Mira Nair’s film version, with script credits divided three ways, does not, and cannot, catch the novelist’s urbane, satiric presence is understandable. What is impossible to overlook, however, is the movie’s misrepresentation of the original engrossing tale, as well. “Cutting down was the major challenge,” but ludicrous new material has been inserted, and what has been retained distorted beyond all fairness. The release’s “one of America’s most popular stars . . . [and] the world’s most acclaimed directors . . . [and] the greatest female characters ever created” says everything about Hollywood insistence on unsubtle superlative at any cost.

Set in the early nineteenth-century Regency of George IV as Prince of Wales, the story reverses the familiar literary pairing of the pure blonde whom one marries and the exotic sensual brunette, an outsider who must be disposed of. Ringleted curls flouncing all over, Becky Sharp (Reese Witherspoon) is the orphan daughter of talented, failed, alcoholic artist Francis -- Thackeray initially considered painting as a profession and early illustrated his own writing -- and a French chorus girl. A social climber from the get-go, she will use all of her sex’s wiles to rise in society. From Miss Pinkerton’s Female Academy, she is hired as rural Hampshire governess to the daughters of boorish Sir Pitt Crawley (Bob Hoskins) but goes on to bigger game in London, invited there by his cantankerous, free speaking, rich unmarried sister Matilda (Eileen Atkins), who admires the spunk of this redhead she recognizes as an “adventuress.” Moving amidst the sets and costumes which aside from Atkins are the only plusses around, Becky again meets weaker-willed girlhood friend Amelia Sedley (Romola Garai) and secretly marries Captain Rawdon (James Purefoy), Sir Pitt’s son from a first marriage and Matilda’s favorite and heir.

Dark-haired pale Amelia marries Captain George Osborne (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), the spoiled womanizing son of an ambitious self-made businessman (Jim Broadbent), but does not recognize Captain William Dobbin’s (Rhys Ifans) Cyrano-like adoration of her. Amelia’s family loses everything, and, Aunt Matilda disinheriting Rawdon despite her supposed fondness for “imprudent marriages,” Becky and her spouse are also down on their luck. Both women pregnant, their husbands are marshaled against Napoleon’s Hundred Days and sent to Belgium, from which only one will return. A disillusioned Dobbin will drown his heartache in India, Becky will scheme, and, with an incongruously good eye for artistic merit, a mysteriously glimpsed, powerful and wealthy Marquis of Steyne (Gabriel Byrne) will enter the picture.

Thackeray and readers alike could not help but root for his “I’m no angel” Becky, but there is nothing to care for in this overblown, garbled-sound production, probably released now to avoid December Oscar-consideration embarrassment. Acting is either stiff or else eyeball-rolling out of ‘twenties stage melodrama, the post-battle Waterloo field cheesy, Thackeray’s birthplace of India as fake as a Sabu-Hall-Montez set, and even the push-‘em-up décolletage uselessly flat compared with its use in Tom Jones. Laughter was not with, but at, the film, whose end shot is emblematic: Becky’s traveled RS-monogrammed trunk bobbing up-and-down above an elephant’s rump.

“Ah!” he concluded, “Vanitas Vanitatum!”

(Released by Focus Features and rated "PG-13" for sensuality, partial nudity and a brief violent image.)