They Think It's Normal

New York is the past for me now. I don’t know what goes on there anymore. Maybe it’s worse, which seems possible based on the headlines and other things I’ve heard, but I probably shouldn’t speculate. The New York that I knew felt exciting, it felt alive, it felt like anything was possible. I went all around that city when I could. There were days when I walked down more streets than I ever thought was possible. There were late nights when I walked down dark streets that I shouldn’t have. There were times I’ll never forget that couldn’t have happened anywhere else. There were glorious movie theaters. Back then it felt like the world. It was also the one where the film version of THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES was made and even though the New York portrayed in it wasn’t one that I really knew, being sheltered up in Scarsdale and all much of the time, something about it still seemed familiar. The novel by Tom Wolfe which I read a few years earlier seemed like an ultra-sophisticated and darkly funny look at a world I simply assumed was out there. Maybe the book isn’t as good as it seemed to me then but as far as the film goes, the book matters and it also doesn’t. I have no idea what happened to my old copy anyway and I’m not about to start digging for it but some of the book still lingers in the mind to go with that nagging feeling of how much the film is missing the mark. It doesn’t feel like a book that has lasted, maybe because what it was about was so much a product of the moment, but even taken on its own the film suffers from trying to squeeze so much plot that came from roughly 700 pages into just over two hours at the expense of what was so memorable about the source although even this is hardly its only problem. There are definite issues of tone along with trying to make its story relatable, as well as understandable, to anyone who doesn’t know New York instead of addressing the characters for who they really are. It’s a big budget movie star movie that tries to make the people in it likable simply because they’re being played by movie stars and this is simply the wrong film to try to pull that off.

Now going on thirty-five years old, the Brian De Palma adaptation of THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES remains a legend in the history of massive flops, a reputation helped by the publication a year later of the book “The Devil’s Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco” written by Julie Salamon which documented the film’s production and the calamitous response when it was released in immaculate detail. Devouring the book at the time remains a vivid memory—I recall staying up to the early morning hours to finish it before Salamon came in the next day for an interview on the show where I worked—and reading some of that very same copy of the book again all these years later, I can’t help but have sympathy for De Palma who is a director I normally revere but simply miscalculated here in what felt like an attempt to please everyone although I’m willing to allow that he of course tried his best. I’ve seen the film multiple times over the years beginning with opening weekend right before Christmas Day 1990 and have never been able to stretch as far as actually calling it good but as wrongheaded as the film remains, by now I’ve developed a certain amount of affection for what it attempts, partly because the style De Palma brings to the material is evident, partly because no one attempts to make a film like this anymore. If someone did try—if anyone were crazy enough to attempt to remake the material, that is—it would likely be a multi-part series for streaming and it might be technically ‘good’, whatever that means, but I probably would get bored by the end of episode two and never go back, like a few streaming shows these days that I can think of. Everything else aside, at least the film is interesting and the older I get, the more I realize that counts for something. No one, after all, needs a more smoothly polite version of anything, certainly not THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES. And the film that did get made may not be entirely polite about what it sets out to do but it never seems to find the right sort of alternative.

New York bond trader Sherman McCoy (Tom Hanks) is a massive success and sees his entire being as a “Master of the Universe” closing deals for hundreds of millions of dollars like it’s nothing at all. He has a wife named Judy (Kim Cattrall), a daughter, a huge Park Avenue apartment and a mistress in the form of Maria Ruskin (Melanie Griffith) who he picks up at the airport one night for their latest rendezvous. But on the way back into the city Sherman misses their exit off the expressway and soon they wind up deep in the South Bronx totally lost. While finding an on ramp they encounter two young black men who may or may not be there to help and as they attempt to flee one of the kids is struck by the car. Safe back in Maria’s apartment, Sherman is panicked over what has just happened while Maria feels relief that they managed to get away but when the kid winds up in the hospital the firebrand Reverend Bacon (John Hancock) takes an interest, determined to get this into the press in order to have the city investigate and Assistant District Attorney Jed Kramer (Saul Rubinek) prosecute. To get this done the City Light tabloid enlists has-been, alcoholic reporter Peter Fallow (Bruce Willis) to their side and soon enough Sherman realizes that the walls are beginning to close in on him.

Even back when the film first opened, something seemed off right from the start in how THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES is visually spectacular throughout but too often this doesn’t happen in the right way. The time lapse shot of the Manhattan skyline taken from the Chrysler Building at the start of the opening credits is expertly done but doesn’t feel like anything particularly unique, no matter how complicated it was to attain. The famed prolonged Steadicam shot that follows as the credits continue, showing a drunken Peter Fallow played by Bruce Willis arriving at the event meant to honor him, is phenomenally executed on a technical level but the sequence still never feels like it’s about anything, playing like a case of De Palma determined to get such a shot in there whether it belonged or not, an attempt to visually open up a dialogue-heavy story or maybe compete with Scorsese’s famous GOODFELLAS Copacabana shot from earlier in the year. And maybe all this says something about the film’s visual approach to the city of New York, one of the greatest places in the world to photograph and a location De Palma had already explored in the past with incidental elements in films going back to the sixties, yet based on this film it feels like there’s nothing about the city circa 1990 that particularly interested him in a visual way so any sort of character to the city never comes through. However much really was filmed on location it never provides any sort of feeling of the actual place, no sense of what the city was in these days, no sense of what it was like to be in one of those crowded restaurants, no sense of what it was like to walk down the street.

That Steadicam shot is at least a visual idea and maybe since so much of the rest of the film focuses strictly on the plot and dialogue there’s simply no time or place for other such visual flourishes outside of what feel like Strangelovian-wide angle lenses to accentuate elements in a shot. With a screenplay by Michael Cristofer (who later shared the screen with Bruce Willis when he played a role in DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE) based on the novel by Tom Wolfe which originated as a serial in Rolling Stone, the movie offers the basic story but it’s the texture that hasn’t quite been translated so the De Palma quote saying he first envisioned this as a sort of cross between THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS and SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS makes me dream of what could have been. He can’t seem to find a way to bring this script to life since so much of it seems to be equal parts exposition and speeches meant to reflect things metaphorically with no middle ground, not enough room to play so it all feels stilted as the actors scramble around to play things as broad comedy. The epic feel that came from the sprawl of Tom Wolfe’s prose – and all these years later the idea of that compulsively readable sprawl is what I mostly remember, like the description of Sherman’s cab ride to work at the beginning -- is gone and the story all by itself feels surprisingly small now. Or maybe because of what we’ve gone through in the decades since all the scrambling around by everyone really does seem like a lot of hubbub over not very much which makes me wish there could be more visually to take in, the feeling of something more that the film might have wanted to say outside of all those long speeches.

Something in the staging is missing, an epic quality to make it more cinematic that would be a visual equivalent to all those words—maybe the film needed its own version of how a few years later the narrator of Scorsese’s THE AGE OF INNOCENCE doted on every last detail of the world being portrayed or maybe just something else to give a feel of the energy that’s there all through the city. Too often it feels like De Palma doesn’t quite know how to stage all this dialogue in a way that interests him and only on rare occasions, like the framing of a car scene seemingly lifted from THE SHINING or another shot that is almost the exact inversion of the way he later filmed a scene in his own MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, does it feel at all playful in a way that helps the rhythm of what a scene might be going for. Even when he utilizes split screen at one point, just as he has done multiple times before and since, the device feels shoehorned in as if he’s trying to come up with something, anything, other than just flatly shooting the scene head-on but the staging feels like he pulled back from the idea when editing so for a few minutes the onscreen action plays entirely on the right side of the frame. Just like this scene, it’s a film being made by a master with a stylistic approach that for whatever reason he can’t take all the way so the idea never lands. Split diopter shots turn up, one speaker phone conversation at Sherman’s Wall Street firm is filmed entirely from above, Steadicam movements track the actors as they walk endlessly but it all seems to be for little effect. The De Palma satires GREETINGS and HI, MOM! from several decades earlier both of which starred Robert De Niro feel like they should be obvious precursors to this material—particularly the almost unbearably funny “Be Black, Baby” sequence in HI, MOM! which is one of the most racially charged pieces of satire ever—but it’s not really the case, so it doesn’t even feel clear what attracted him to the material, especially since he doesn’t seem to have enough good ideas for filming much of it. Maybe since the film had to be so expensive the freewheeling sense of how De Palma films back in the ‘70s felt where it seemed like anything could happen in the next scene is long gone. Even the specificity of how characters in the book are drawn feel like they’re based on actual people, or at least actual types prevalent in the city then but the film, knowing that people who live nowhere near the east coast aren’t going to care about those things, doesn’t bother with any of that so it never feels like any actual reality being satirized other than the generic concepts of things like ‘racism’ and ‘rich people’.

The movie does at least attempt to make the audience feel a little uncomfortable with its portrayal of the Bronx as a war zone as Melanie Griffith’s temptress Maria Ruskin asks, “Where are all the white people?” when they drive through it. The Al Sharpton parody that is the extravagant Reverend Bacon played by John Hancock whose belief in his ability to control the righteous steam of the city that’s ready to blow and gain his own power in making sure that someone pays for all that anger, expresses this through a speech that at least approaches challenging what the audience for this might be looking for although something like the gospel choir that follows him around always singing feels like a stylistic extreme taken too far. But all this winds up feeling disconnected from however the film feels about its main characters. Sherman McCoy is clearly an unsympathetic, unlikable schmuck but the film doesn’t know what to do with that feeling and presents the story as the character’s redemption, his great chance to break away from how the world sees him taking all this on faith because of the star playing the role. Peter Fallow, who never quite seemed to be the second lead in the book the way he is here (way back when the Bruce Willis casting was announced I first assumed it was a miscasting of assistant D.A. Kramer, played to the ceiling in the film by Saul Rubinek) also gets the narrating duties which sort of make him an audience surrogate but the disinterest in Willis’ voice and casualness of the final result is even less successful than, say, BLADE RUNNER. “Christ, was this the world he lived in?” that voiceover asks when lightly touching on details as Sherman walks through a society reception with Willis’ demeanor feeling all wrong and it spells out the obvious a little too much while not adding anything particularly interesting. Not to mention how the film tries very hard to give more depth to someone named Fallow although the way it’s played, there barely seems to be a character to add anything to anyway. Fallow was British in the book, the better to make him a low-level employee in a Rupert Murdoch-type empire, and maybe a few years later they could have gotten Hugh Grant when his stardom exploded. Then again, the studio never would have waited a few years to make this film with such a topical plotline even if the actual film never seems to take advantage of that. But the daydream of this film being made in the mid-90s makes me think of Mike Nichols directing it with a screenplay by Elaine May around the time they did THE BIRDCAGE (the movie of the moment they did make later was PRIMARY COLORS, based on another book that has now faded from prominence) and that right there offers an idea of what is missing from the film that got made as the city emerged from the tensions of the ‘80s, no matter how much this was the only time the movie could have made sense.

The script that did get made does give us Melanie Griffith saying, “Don’t think, Sherman. Just fuck,” which at least is a good line although that’s a low bar. And maybe the film is politically confused about what it wants to say or at least uncertain how it feels about all this, maybe just wanting not to upset anyone while still trying to seem edgy, acknowledging the politics while still presenting it all as ridiculous. The tone comes closest to showing some depth during the big speech by the unbilled F. Murray Abraham as the Bronx District Attorney with the actor bringing all the right energy to his biting dialogue (“You don’t think the future knows how to cross a bridge?” giving the whole thing weight for just a few seconds) but in a way, the Tony Roberts (RIP) speech in the great THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE, a film which really does hold up as an incisive portrait of a racially charged New York, on what the voters are going to care about if the ransom on the subway hostages is paid (“The rich’ll support you, likewise the blacks and the Puerto Ricans won’t give a shit.”) gets to the point more succinctly than anything here.

The money is onscreen with cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond and production design by Richard Sylbert that makes each scene look great. There are moments here and there that work but even when those things jump out it can sometimes still feel misplaced. Sherman’s reconciliation with his father played by Donald Moffat is actually a good scene, well-performed by both actors. It’s just in the wrong movie. Sentiment isn’t what’s needed, but even when the tone stays a little nasty like a drunk scene involving Bruce Willis and Beth Broderick as a woman who gives Fallow some key information the moment has potential but never manages to find the wit, resulting in a scene involving two drunk people that badly needs some Blake Edwards flair. We need to feel the opulence, we need to get the taste of a steak at a restaurant on the upper east side, we need the rush of one last martini before the check comes and you realize how much money you just spent. But along with that the film also needs a real kind of satirical anger and it can’t figure out a way to get you to choke on a laugh when the joke has gone too far. The film badly needs a bite that stings and this just isn’t there. Even the score feels like it needs the harsh trumpets of Elmer Bernstein music blaring and instead offers an easy listening saxophone vibe through the score by Dave Grusin that it does have which is maybe too lighthearted about the whole thing, although the bursts of classical music connected to the Don Giovanni sequence work much better. Too often it feels like the director doesn’t has the right inspiration for how to shoot all the dialogue and, as it is, a few zoom-ins on tape recorders playing have the most purely De Palma feel out of anything in the entire film.

Even the big meeting between the two male leads on the subway where Sherman opens up to Fallow without realizing who he is falls flat, with maybe the most notable thing about it being when Tom Hanks breaks down crying when he realizes he pissed his pants. I guess the film is saying everyone is guilty but only the white guys realize how guilty they are. This comes down to the infamous speech about Decency during the big climactic courtroom scene, spoken by the one character who isn’t guilty about anything in a stab at a Capra feel that becomes too much of an attempt at flashing a moral in capital letters to the audience before it all ends abruptly. The film version turned this judge, in the book a Jew named Myron Kominsky who keeps a righteous hold on things in his courtroom, into the thinly drawn Judge White played by Morgan Freeman as the epitome of all that is noble to maybe balance things out racially speaking but this also means that just about the strongest imagery involving a Jewish character has a bit player singing “Pennies From Heaven” at a funeral instead of taking control of a rioting courtroom. Morgan Freeman of course displays authority but aside from saying, “Get out of my face” to defendants a few times there really isn’t anything at all to the characterization. The film wants to redeem the people that it wants to redeem but that’s not the story. It’s also not funny, but this is of relatively minor importance. What does feel important is the lack of sprawl to the narrative that needs to ask the question of how the world has gotten to this place and maybe the only answer is to let the whole system burn down. It needs to show that there are no good guys and if they’re going to fuck you, you have to fuck them first. People don’t do the right thing, after all. Just typing out that sentence makes me wonder what a Spike Lee version of this would have been and the answer would have likely had more anger than the studio would have ever wanted but that version would also have been at least interesting too and maybe much more than that. The smart aleck nature of the way De Palma plays the material extends to the ending which I guess is meant to be a cynical curtain call, where good has sort of triumphed after beating the system at its own game but it doesn’t really matter. It also makes me wonder how good Peter Fallow’s book could really be, even if it is bullshit, since he did such a half-hearted job as narrator. Basically, everyone is applauding the moment because nobody cares about whatever the truth really was. All that matters is they get to have a nice dinner. These days, that might be the thing that has aged the best about this considering where we’ve ended up in the real world. But it still doesn’t make for much of an ending to the film.

Tom Hanks is adrift here no matter how much he tries, working to give each scene life and somehow bring his innate likability to a character who doesn’t possess any at all, but as much as he never quite convinces that he’s someone who doesn’t remember his doorman’s name is clearly trying his best. Bruce Willis, somewhere between the run of DIE HARD 2, MORTAL THOUGHTS and HUDSON HAWK, never feels like he’s doing much beyond wearing expensive suits which seem all wrong for this character and the way he underplays things feels too much the opposite of everyone else going through the roof. To be fair to him, Willis made several films in the ‘90s where it genuinely felt like he was trying to stretch, but the vibe coming off his performance that he’s maybe glanced at the script a few times means this simply isn’t one of them. When the news of the actor’s retirement due to his medical condition was officially announced, I found myself putting on this film that night even though I wasn’t sure why and maybe this speaks to my strange fascination with it that never went away but maybe also I was trying to find something of note to his performance because I wanted to, I always wanted to love Bruce Willis in films, but it still doesn’t seem to be there. Melanie Griffith and her exaggerated southern drawl does provide the right sort of energy whenever she turns up so it all feels refreshingly effortless in a film where you can feel the strain too much of the time, if only all the malapropism-filled dialogue she has was funnier. Even while overplaying things Kim Cattrall still brings the right sort of desperation towards making sure her character’s façade never cracks, the unbilled F. Murray Abraham probably does the most with all the dialogue he gets and Alan King in his big monologue, one of the best written speeches in the film and the one that really expresses what this is all about, is similarly enjoyable. Other actors find moments here and there, like Robert Stephens of Bily Wilder’s THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES as the Murdoch-like publisher, Norman Parker’s police detective who subtly begins reading McCoy his rights during their first meeting plus a Richard Belzer appearance is always welcome, but there are also actors in this film who I normally like but many of them are either playing it all wrong or were misdirected as part of the attempt to have everything be as big as possible. There’s no point to single out any of these people for blame although I will mention that no movie ever needs to have this much Geraldo Rivera. Among all the familiar faces, a very pregnant Rita Wilson is a publicist at the beginning, Kirsten Dunst makes one of her first appearances here as Hanks’ daughter and this is also a reminder of the days when films would feature random appearances by George Plimpton but I guess this was a long time ago.

When the Christmas present to the world that was THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES came out on December 21, 1990, it immediately died. The opening weekend box office came in behind the first weekend of KINDERGARTEN COP, the second weekend of LOOK WHO’S TALKING TOO and several other films as well. Everything that season was beaten by HOME ALONE including other big-budget flops aimed at adults like THE RUSSIA HOUSE and HAVANA with only THE GODFATHER PART III doing anything near halfway decent business. It was hard to see the movie as its own thing at the time since too many people had opinions about what it should have been. It was also hard when the book about making it came out the following year and it’s still hard not to think about all the things surrounding it so many years later. But focusing on what the movie is even for a few minutes, shutting everything else out, it feels clear that De Palma and the other people involved just didn’t crack the material, which maybe is the only thing that needs to be said about it all these years later. In his book “Cinema Speculation”, Tarantino references how in making this film De Palma “would fall on his face and never really get back up again after fucking up Tom Wolfe” which is a little harsh not just because it ignores the films he made after this which are worth defending but because fucking up Tom Wolfe hardly seems like the biggest error a director can make. The epic scale of hubris displayed in Julie Salamon’s “The Devil’s Candy” could even be seen as a sort of spiritual sequel to the original novel, only things worked out better for Brian De Palma than the book’s version of Sherman McCoy. He got to make CARLITO’S WAY and MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, after all, not to mention the phenomenal FEMME FATALE. I still love Brian De Palma films and wish the same could be said about this one, much as I want to be the one person around to proclaim this film really is great and you’re all just missing it. But there is something about THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES that keeps me coming back to it, maybe to understand the things that went wrong even more, maybe to find the good film that might be buried in there somewhere, whether it reconciles with the book or not. Maybe one of these days. This is something I can’t explain, but the fact that I do return to it has to mean something. I don’t rewatch WISE GUYS, after all. And I’ll probably return to this film again, looking for some kind of answer. Or maybe it’s all just an attempt to still try to remember the past.