A flat sharp

National Review, Sept 27, 2004 by Jonathan Foreman

Photographed by Declan Quinn, Nair's superb collaborator on Monsoon Wedding, the film takes in a wider canvas than a Masterpiece Theater production but sometimes feels a little cramped, in the way of so many lower-budget costume films. (One misses the grand scale of Kubrick's Thackeray venture, Barry Lyndon, especially in the scenes dealing with the battle of Waterloo.)

All the film's virtues only underscore how regrettable is its fall into the trap of modern sentimentalism. After all, the always-terrific Witherspoon would have had no difficulty playing a sweet-faced but ruthless little manipulator--she did so, wonderfully, in Election and Freeway--whose callousness is only partially explained by her circumstances. In the film, as in the book, the newly graduated Becky throws the gift of a copy of Johnson's Dictionary (a symbol of 18th-century sensibilities) out of her carriage window. But in the book, she's hurling it back not at a mean schoolteacher but, with stunning callousness, at the feet of a sweet little girl who adores her. The sight of America's heart-faced sweetheart behaving with such careless cruelty might have had the impact of Henry Fonda's murder of the little boy in Once Upon a Time in the West.

Mr. Foreman is a New York-based writer and critic.