Softening Thackeray's Sharp for Hollywood's expectations

Fewer could identify Amelia Sedley, initially Sharp's friend, who moves from wealth to poverty to reasonable comfort via a brief marriage to shallow snob George Osborne - who is one of Sharp's many conquests.

All this takes place against the background of commercial and social life in Britain in the years before and after the battle of Waterloo.

Neither woman's story ends happily. Sharp becomes a raddled, if indomitable, kept woman. Sedley finally marries the selfless Dobbin, who has loved her from afar but, by the time she notices, has begun to cool.

Mira Nair and her scriptwriters have, in effect, produced a well-drawn comic strip which tells most of the story well and is very watchable. But it is now almost entirely Sharp's story, skewed to give her a degree of human warmth not found in Thackeray.

And the ending, for both women, is greatly softened. This is a Hollywood costume movie, in which, whatever the pitfalls of sex and marriage, romance of some sort must win through.

Reese Witherspoon catches Sharp's wit, charm and deviousness. When required to be disconcerted, however, she becomes a typical US teenager.

Several carriage loads of British and Irish actors - Romola Garai, Eileen Atkins, Geraldine McEwen, Jim Broadbent, Gabriel Byrne, Bob Hoskins, James Purefoy, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and many others - provide vivid characterisations.

Rhys Ifans as Dobbin is dignified and, when necessary, distressed or angry, but doesn't bring these qualities together into one character.

The script is often witty but sometimes anachronistic. "Not this time I don't," says one indignant lady.

Well designed, costumed and shot, well directed and acted - if you can accept this for what it is, you will enjoy it.

Then read the book and find out why Thackeray ended with the question, "Which of us is happy in this world?"

GORDON THOMAS