I have the good fortune to live fairly close to a truly world-class opera company. A couple of decades ago, we used to attend fairly regularly, seeing the complete seasons for a couple of years. For reasons that elude even myself, my go-to attire for these events was a white suit and straw fedora. I didn’t realize I was adopting anybody’s else’s look until a woman pointed at me from some distance away and said, “Tom Wolfe…” I then recalled his trademark manner of dress and realized that, indeed, I was unintentionally aping him.
The only work of his with which I am familiar is Bonfire of the Vanities, a novel which might as well have been legally mandated reading in the late 1980’s. I read it, and have no idea why I did, as I was in my mid-teens, living in flyover country and far from the text’s target demographic. Then it was made into a movie in 1990 and that became a whole other thing. It was such a disaster that a book documenting its insane production, The Devil’s Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood, became a bestseller itself.
Some adaptations of famous novels try to their best to honor the source material. Here is a movie which seems to think it will automatically be accepted as great just because of the book it is based on. Spoiler alert: it is not.
It is not for lack of trying. You don’t need to see a frame of the film to see where most of the money went, as this stars Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, Kim Cattrall and Morgan Freeman. As for the rest of that money, fuggedaboutit, because this was shot on the streets and in famous interiors of New York City, baby. And what shots they are. Why, just the names of the leads and the title gradually fade in and out over a time lapse of Manhattan with one of the art deco gargoyles of the Chrysler building in the foreground. An entire day goes by, but this is already going so slowly, that it feels like it takes an entire day for us to watch just this sequence.
The rest of the credits play out over an equally audacious shot: an unbroken Steadicam take which follows Bruce Willis through the parking garage and bowels of a building, paparazzi intruding at all times from the margins of the frame. Willis downs one drink after another while en route, makes a pass a young woman and sticks his hand into a salmon mousse, shoveling a big chunk of into his paw. That is actually a pretty good metaphor for the picture overall: messy, expensive and pointless.
This is also the first scene in which we hear Willis’s narration. Like so many other films, it will pointlessly tell us stuff we already can discern, such as Hanks wishing he could tell wife Cattrall he truly loves her but that he wants more out of life. Funny, but I was able to tell that just from Hank’s expressions.
Specifically, Hanks wants Griffith, a trophy wife of airline magnate Alan King. No knock on Griffith, but I’m already having problems suspending my disbelief that Hanks is married to Cattrall but is cheating of her with Griffith. Plus Griffith lays on the Southern Peach shtick awfully thick here. I suspect her performance here was led to her being cast in the Judy Holliday role in a pointless remake of Born Yesterday three years later.
Her character presents the rare opportunity to summarize somebody’s entire personality just from some of their quips. Lines such as “Don’t you want a little poontang first?”, “You got caught red herring”, “I only read the papers spasmodically”, “I hope you hang in the electric chair!”, “It’s a dead tire?” (which I will reluctantly concede was the only line in the more than two hours of runtime I actually chuckled over) or “Sherman, where are all the white people?”
The last was actually directed at Hanks, and concerned an unexpected detour they end up taking through the Bronx after he misses an exit on the expressway. This is a certain kind of White person’s worst nightmare of a world of non-Caucasian people: people casually wandering through the streets outside of crosswalks when they aren’t smashing windshields and setting cars on fire. When a large tire (the same which Griffith asked if it was deceased) blocks their return to the expressway, he gets out and tries to move it, only to be confronted by two young Black men who seem to pose a threat in the situation, yet their intentions are cryptic. And we’ll never find out whether they were helpful or harmful when Griffith takes the wheel and runs over one of them.
The incident will eventually be traced back to Hanks’s car and to the man himself, resulting in the kind of debacle which makes headlines for weeks. D.A. F. Murray Abraham will exploit the situation in his mayoral campaign, while his appointed underling on the case (Saul Rubinek, playing the most nebbishy Jewish lawyer who ever nebbished) will use this as an opportunity to rise quickly in the department. Al Sharpton surrogate John Hancock rallies the Black community as a selfish ruse to promote public awareness of himself.
And the worst of the bunch, and the most successful, is Willis. He plays a journalist whose career is in freefall, and who happens into three incredibly lucky breaks concerning Hanks and the trial of him for the vehicular assault. One of those is when the journalist just happens to be at the right point outside the courthouse to catch a fleeing Hanks, who then unburdens himself to Willis on the long train ride home. This betrayal of trust is apparently one of the cornerstones of Willis’s resulting book, for which he is receiving so many accolades in that opening scene. A giant banner of the book cover reveals it is uncannily similar to that of Wolfe’s novel, a touch I found to be not clever as the filmmakers likely believe it to be.
What made Wolfe’s book distinctive is every character is portrayed as reprehensible. A huge problem with the film version is it wants to make Hanks into the hero, albeit a flawed one. At the very least, it wants us to empathize with somebody who isn’t a good person, and he even does an immoral thing to eventually get himself off the hook. In the final narration, Willis observes of Hanks that there is a man who sold everything he had to gain his soul. If he did, then I am deeply confused as to how lying in court to introduce otherwise inadmissible evidence saved his soul. Hanks is even made to be the victim of this piece as soon as his mistress has run over a man, with Willis intoning on the soundtrack: “And there it was. A simple wrong turn. Any of us could have done it.”
Then there’s judge Freeman’s speech to the court spectators who are outraged at what they see as a miscarriage of justice. Having shamed all involved, he tells them to go home and be decent people. I guess that also goes for White guy who gets off scot-free.
There is one scene that left a spectacularly bad taste in my mouth, and that when Hancock’s reverend consoles the grieving mother of the lad struck by Griffith: “I know nothing can heal the wound that you’ve suffered. But $10 million in damages will certainly make your grief more comfortable.” Mom stops crying and look upward in awe: “Well, I could use a few things.” That would work in a film where every character is loathsome, but it is quite ugly in a film where there are characters such as Freeman, who are moral. And it is especially appalling when Hanks is given any grace.
The director is Brian De Palma, who could never resist the opportunity to use such techniques as split screens, even if they don’t truly work in service to the film. One irritating bit of excessive showiness is a conference call shot show with a wide-angle lens on a camera pointing downwards from the ceiling and turning in circles as it makes its descent.
Even the score is surprisingly bad, with one deeply odd touch being whimsical music that guts the impact of the accompanying scene. At other times, the music seems to foretell that which would later be used on the TV show Law & Order. Not that I have a problem with the music as used on the show, but that doesn’t mean that kind of fare is appropriate for a major motion picture, especially one that is supposed to be a “prestige” feature such as this.
Go figure, Richard Belzer, who would go on to appear in that film, has a cameo here. There’s also George Plimpton, whom I predominately know from the Intellivision commercials he did in the 80’s. We also get an extended cameo from Geraldo Rivera, completely in his element as a tabloid news journalist. I’m just surprised there wasn’t a surprise appearance by Donald Trump, because he would be in his element here.
It is difficult to think of nice things to say about this movie, but I’m going to try. Cattrall has a moment of interesting nuance in a largely thankless role, as she carefully watches and imitates the motions of an older society matron seated next to her at the opera. And there is one moment I fully believed in Hanks’s performance, and that is when he despairs to Willis on the subway that he just then realized he had pissed his pants in jail. Also, Freeman is fully believable as the judge, except he is too morally grounded to belong to the world of this film.
Bonfire of the Vanities likely couldn’t have worked if was a straight adaptation of Wolfe’s novel, but somebody was delusional if they thought the central story was strong enough to soften its misanthropic heart. What ends up on the screen is neither fish nor foul, a mangled morality tale consisting of disparate pieces that don’t fit. Or, at least, they fit about as poorly as I would if I tried to squeeze myself into that white suit I haven’t worn since an opera a couple of decades ago.
Dir: Brian de Palma
Starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, Morgan Freeman
Watched on Kanopy