"The Bonfire of the Vanities" is one of those films which is widely supposed to be enjoyed by those who have not read the book on which it is based, and hated by those who have; other examples include "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" and the recent "Brideshead Revisited", although in many people's eyes that film also suffered by comparison with the well-known television adaptation. So let me make my position clear from the start. I have read Tom Wolfe's novel, and loved it, and yet I quite enjoyed the film as well.
The story concerns Sherman McCoy, a rich Wall Street financier, whose life collapses after his car is involved in an accident in which a black teenager is seriously injured. Sherman, in fact, was not driving at the time of the accident (the car was being driven by his mistress Maria Ruskin), but he is unable to reveal this fact as he does not want his wife Judy to discover his extra-marital affair. The case is taken up by Peter Fallow, a cynical alcoholic journalist, and The Reverend Bacon, a populist black preacher, and becomes a cause celebre. Sherman is arrested and put on trial, while being pilloried in the media as a greedy, heartless white banker who recklessly injured a black youth and then callously abandoned him. The film-makers have softened Wolfe's plot by giving it a happy, or at least a happier, ending and by making the characters of Sherman and Fallow more sympathetic. Unlike in the book, Fallow undergoes a change of heart and becomes Sherman's ally rather than one of his tormentors.
There seem to be two, related, reasons why the film's detractors dislike it. The first lies in the changes made to the plot. The second lies in what they see as inappropriate casting, and I have some sympathy with them as far as Tom Hanks, who plays Sherman, is concerned. In the original novel, Sherman was in many ways an unattractive character, the sort of man who regarded himself as a "Master of the Universe", whereas in the film his arrogance and financial greed are very much played down. Admittedly, he is cheating on his wife, but as Kim Cattrall plays Judy as cold, sarcastic, snobbish and self-centred, even his infidelity does not prejudice us against him. In the eighties Hanks was best known for playing the hero of light comedies such as "Splash" and "Big", and "The Bonfire of the Vanities" was clearly an attempt to extend his range into more heavyweight material. Nevertheless, Sherman still comes across as a typical Hanks character, the genial, likable Mr Nice Guy. This may have been quite deliberate on the part of the film-makers, but I thought that it wasted one of Wolfe's major themes, his criticism of the materialistic "greed is good" culture of the eighties. Despite his reputation as a socially conservative writer, Wolfe is no great admirer of unrestricted capitalism, which is also satirised in his second novel, "A Man in Full".
I felt that those who complained about miscasting concentrated too much on Hanks, as most of the other roles are well played. Certainly, there are some changes. In the book the brunette Maria is rather more sophisticated than the blonde, gold-digging bimbo played by Melanie Griffith, and Peter Fallow is a louche Englishman rather than the hard-bitten New Yorker played by Bruce Willis. Yet I felt that, in the context of the film, these particular characterisations worked well, even if the characters were not quite the same as those created by Wolfe. I also liked Cattrall as Judy and F. Murray Abraham as district attorney Abe Weiss, the cynical careerist who makes a great play of being a concerned liberal. He is the sort of prosecutor who is more interested in his political future- he has ambitions to become mayor of New York- than he is in justice; he is obsessed with Sherman's case because he believes that obtaining a conviction against a wealthy white defendant will ingratiate himself with black voters. ("A Time to Kill", made a few years later, features a very similar DA, played in that case by Kevin Spacey- exxcept that Spacey's character wanted to convict a black defendant to ingratiate himself with white voters).
Wolfe's book was never going to be an easy one to transfer to the screen. It is a long, complex book, written in the style of the nineteenth century novelists whom the author admires. Dickens was one major influence, and the title (apart from its reference to Savonarola's burning of luxuries in the Florence of the 1490s) is an allusion to Thackeray's "Vanity Fair". Its complexity meant that its full nuances could never be transferred to the screen in full, and any cinema adaptation would have to be very much simplified. The solution adopted by director Brian De Palma and scriptwriter Michael Cristofer was to make the film as a satirical black comedy, and I think that, on the whole, this approach works quite well. The film might tone down Wolfe's satire on capitalist excesses, but it keeps some of his other targets. The film takes potshots at muckraking journalism- Fallow's articles are inspired less by sympathy with the injured boy than by the need to find a good story to ingratiate himself with his editor- at clergymen who misuse religion for political ends, and at the legal system, here represented by Weiss. The film, for me, will never quite capture the excitement I felt reading Wolfe's great novel, but it makes a respectable attempt at capturing something of its spirit. 7/10
The story concerns Sherman McCoy, a rich Wall Street financier, whose life collapses after his car is involved in an accident in which a black teenager is seriously injured. Sherman, in fact, was not driving at the time of the accident (the car was being driven by his mistress Maria Ruskin), but he is unable to reveal this fact as he does not want his wife Judy to discover his extra-marital affair. The case is taken up by Peter Fallow, a cynical alcoholic journalist, and The Reverend Bacon, a populist black preacher, and becomes a cause celebre. Sherman is arrested and put on trial, while being pilloried in the media as a greedy, heartless white banker who recklessly injured a black youth and then callously abandoned him. The film-makers have softened Wolfe's plot by giving it a happy, or at least a happier, ending and by making the characters of Sherman and Fallow more sympathetic. Unlike in the book, Fallow undergoes a change of heart and becomes Sherman's ally rather than one of his tormentors.
There seem to be two, related, reasons why the film's detractors dislike it. The first lies in the changes made to the plot. The second lies in what they see as inappropriate casting, and I have some sympathy with them as far as Tom Hanks, who plays Sherman, is concerned. In the original novel, Sherman was in many ways an unattractive character, the sort of man who regarded himself as a "Master of the Universe", whereas in the film his arrogance and financial greed are very much played down. Admittedly, he is cheating on his wife, but as Kim Cattrall plays Judy as cold, sarcastic, snobbish and self-centred, even his infidelity does not prejudice us against him. In the eighties Hanks was best known for playing the hero of light comedies such as "Splash" and "Big", and "The Bonfire of the Vanities" was clearly an attempt to extend his range into more heavyweight material. Nevertheless, Sherman still comes across as a typical Hanks character, the genial, likable Mr Nice Guy. This may have been quite deliberate on the part of the film-makers, but I thought that it wasted one of Wolfe's major themes, his criticism of the materialistic "greed is good" culture of the eighties. Despite his reputation as a socially conservative writer, Wolfe is no great admirer of unrestricted capitalism, which is also satirised in his second novel, "A Man in Full".
I felt that those who complained about miscasting concentrated too much on Hanks, as most of the other roles are well played. Certainly, there are some changes. In the book the brunette Maria is rather more sophisticated than the blonde, gold-digging bimbo played by Melanie Griffith, and Peter Fallow is a louche Englishman rather than the hard-bitten New Yorker played by Bruce Willis. Yet I felt that, in the context of the film, these particular characterisations worked well, even if the characters were not quite the same as those created by Wolfe. I also liked Cattrall as Judy and F. Murray Abraham as district attorney Abe Weiss, the cynical careerist who makes a great play of being a concerned liberal. He is the sort of prosecutor who is more interested in his political future- he has ambitions to become mayor of New York- than he is in justice; he is obsessed with Sherman's case because he believes that obtaining a conviction against a wealthy white defendant will ingratiate himself with black voters. ("A Time to Kill", made a few years later, features a very similar DA, played in that case by Kevin Spacey- exxcept that Spacey's character wanted to convict a black defendant to ingratiate himself with white voters).
Wolfe's book was never going to be an easy one to transfer to the screen. It is a long, complex book, written in the style of the nineteenth century novelists whom the author admires. Dickens was one major influence, and the title (apart from its reference to Savonarola's burning of luxuries in the Florence of the 1490s) is an allusion to Thackeray's "Vanity Fair". Its complexity meant that its full nuances could never be transferred to the screen in full, and any cinema adaptation would have to be very much simplified. The solution adopted by director Brian De Palma and scriptwriter Michael Cristofer was to make the film as a satirical black comedy, and I think that, on the whole, this approach works quite well. The film might tone down Wolfe's satire on capitalist excesses, but it keeps some of his other targets. The film takes potshots at muckraking journalism- Fallow's articles are inspired less by sympathy with the injured boy than by the need to find a good story to ingratiate himself with his editor- at clergymen who misuse religion for political ends, and at the legal system, here represented by Weiss. The film, for me, will never quite capture the excitement I felt reading Wolfe's great novel, but it makes a respectable attempt at capturing something of its spirit. 7/10