The Bonfire Of The Vanities

Brian De Palma’s adaptation of Tom Wolfe's novel "The Bonfire of the Vanities" was mercilessly lambasted in its day, largely for sanitizing the author’s much-fêted satirical wit and serving up a standard mainstream comedy. I haven’t read Wolfe’s novel but assume the charge is well-founded. The upside if taken simply as a Tom Hanks comedy, at least it is at upper end of his range.

Hanks plays Sherman McCoy, a smug and shallow but wealthy Wall Street trader whose life unravels when his mistress (Melanie Griffith) hits a black youth in the South Bronx whilst they are driving to their trysting place. The incident becomes a political football after down-on-his-luck, dypsomaniacal tabloid journalist Peter Fallow (Bruce Willis) turns it into a hit-and-run story and vested interests try to use it for their own advantage.

Certainly the film relies heavily on the tropes of late 80s/early 90s American comedy and would sit well with any number of Hollywood films from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off  (1986) to Accidental Hero (1992) that mildlyly satirize the American Dream but De Palma’s direction is, to say the least, lavish (cinematography is by Vilmos Zsigmond) for the relative mundanity of the material. Why Bruce Willis as the hack journo is any one’s guess as he attracts too much attention to an under-developed character and Melanie Griffith is ill-suited to the role of the Southern gold-digger but Hanks does quite well as the bumbling McCoy and Kim Cattrall stands out as his neurotic society wife.

Although the top and tail device of Willis’s supposedly Pulitizer prize-winning author recounting McCoy’s story is grossly out-of-proportion to the material, that story in itself makes for a quite entertaining  mainstream comedy of its time – at least for those who haven’t read the book.

 

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