Movies I Love, Part XIX: The Bonfire of the Vanities
Sometimes I feel the need to herald a film that, in the end, simply doesn’t work. If only to gain some perspective.
Tom Wolfe is important in the pantheon of the 20th Century literature. He’s a Patrician, having attended the nation’s most antebellum university, Washington and Lee. And he certainly has developed his affectations, having worn nothing but the white suits of what we’d call a dandy in public for decades. Even during the winter months.
But, at his best, he’s displayed one of the keenest eyes of any cultural observer in the last century. I’m talking Mark Twain perceptive. He captured the 60s in articles gathered in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and The Pump House Gang. His take — The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test — on the Merry Pranksters and Ken Kesey’s band of hippie gypsies was so precise, there are people to this day who think Wolfe was actually a part of that scene.
There is no doubt Wolfe, a Richmond, Virginia native, felt kinship and a part of the snob classes. Yet, he also saw with a focused eye the foibles of that societal segment. The underbelly too. In the 80s, Wolfe decided to write a novel and serialized his drafts in Rolling Stone. Which is how I read The Bonfire of the Vanities.
It was compelling stuff, which he edited significantly until the book came out, even changing the career of Sherman McCoy, the book’s centerpiece, from writer to Wall Street trader. Given how Wolfe skewed the courts and the upper Eastsiders, and the blacks and journalists and rich wives . . . well, everybody . . . the novel was quite the sensation.
Which brings us to Brian DePalma’s cinemazation from a Michael Cristofer screenplay. Which essentially turned Wolfe’s very pithy, very precise, unrelenting observations into, well, a cartoon.
Frankly I hated the film when it came out. Too broad, almost slapstick. Tom Hanks played Sherman McCoy. Melanie Griffith, his lover. They have an accident in the Bronx, when they take a wrong turn coming from the airport. She grabs the wheel and runs over a kid in the street. Major political tsouris and a circus ensues.
I happened upon the movie last night while channel surfing. For some reason, I connected. It is silly. It is still too broad. Too much the farce. The characters, for the most part, are caricatures. Wolfe’s precise scrutiny of every detail — such as the exact model and brand and color of McCoy’s shoes, and cut of his suit — is lost. It is almost vaudevillian.
Yet, yet, yet, upon second look almost twenty years after the movie’s release, there’s something endearing about Griffith’s malapropisms. And Hanks’ overbearing sense of entitlement. Even Kim Cattrell as his wife seems consistent with DePalma’s tone, be it shtick or not.
So, as strange as this seems, I’m recommending this woeful, glorious mishandling of Tom Wolfe’s novel. See The Bonfire of the Vanities. Then get a copy of the book. Read it. You’ll understand how there can be some enjoyment from turning a great, perceptive piece of literature into a trashy comic book on screen.
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