In this free-for-all-Friday Trent reviews his recent interaction with the book and film version of Bonfire of the Vanities.
Trent Horn (00:00):
It’s time to go back to the eighties, 1980s, New York, especially crime, corruption, Giness, dirtiness, everybody’s fake. It’s all depressing. Let’s turn that story into a movie and who should we cast to be in the movie? America’s Lovable Splash Actor to Hanks. That’s the story of Bonfire of the Vanities, the Tom Wolf novel published in 1987. I just read the book for the first time and I just figured I’d chat about it here on Free for All. Friday, Mondays and Wednesdays we talk apologetics and theology. Friday I talk about whatever I want to talk about and I try to keep up with books. I always try to pick a new classic or something to be able to read and listen to broaden the horizons, if you will. I’ve had a hard time though, I mean with my wife’s medical diagnosis things. I was churning through books at the beginning of this year and I was really enjoying it.
(00:52):
After the diagnosis though, I really fell off the wagon of reading things. I slowly got back into it though. And so I wanted to read this one just because I had heard of it before. I really had only heard of the book as a failed movie adaptation, the 1990 film, which I had not seen either. All I knew was when you think about failed movie adaptations, people have always told me the prime example of that is Brian De Palma’s 1990 film Bonfire The Vanities, and Brian De Palma is a very good director. I think the one that when I think of him, I think of Mission Impossible. He did the 1996 Mission Impossible. I was 11 when I saw that, and that just blew my 11-year-old mind. This is cinema. This is not just going to the movies, but it’s action and it’s interesting, it’s complex and really enjoying that, but everybody seems to agree that the ball was really dropped on Bonfire of the Vanities.
(01:45):
So lemme talk about it. Just going into the story, the movie, it’s all really fascinating. So Wolf published a novel in 1987, and it is about racism, class, politics, and greed. 1980s New York. It’s really the quintessential 1980s New York book. If there’s ever a book that encapsulated 1980s New York, this is it. So the book, the main character, the main character is a guy named Sherman McCoy, who is a bond trader. So he’s selling bonds on Wall Street and Wall Street’s, a lot of greed, corruption. People are making money hand over fist. They’re spending lavishly millions of dollars on apartments, fancy parties. It’s all vapid and empty, and McCoy is just not a very good guy. The book opens with him taking his dog for a walk in the rain. So he has an excuse to go to a payphone to call Maria, who is the woman that he’s having an affair with.
(02:44):
Maria Ruskin. So he is going out and then he accidentally calls his wife, is Maria there? She’s like, Sherman, is that you? He’s like, yeah. Then he goes back and then she’s onto him like, you’re calling this woman. What’s going on? He’s like, I didn’t call this woman. And then it goes from that. He’s having this affair with Maria. The novel really starts to pick up when he is driving in a car with Maria, they take a, he misses his exit and they end up in the Bronx. They end up in the bad part of New York. They’re driving around, they don’t know where they’re going, how to get out of there. They get stuck, I think behind, there’s a local parade or something, and there’s a lot of drug dealers, crazy people, criminals. And we got to get out of here and they’re driving and they tried to get back on the expressway to get back to Manhattan.
(03:27):
And the expressways, the ramp they want to get on is blocked by some trash or garbage, probably placed there to stop people. So McCoy gets out to move it. Two black guys, well, one of them is more like a young guy, a kid. They come up to him and the novel’s very ambiguous about what’s going on. That Sherman Overreacts pushes him over, jumps back in the car, and it seems like the car may have nicked one of them. And they drive off and they think, oh, that was a really close one. Then they come to hear that the boy, one of the boys hit his head from that, went to the hospital and then ends up in a coma. And now the local Reverend Reverend Bacon, who is basically a race hustler, he is kind of like Al Sharpton and he wants justice for this.
(04:13):
But in the book you find out that he’s corrupt also, that he’s hiring ex-cons to work for things for charities, funneling money around. And the Episcopal church is trying to reign him in and they’re too timid to do that. They don’t want to be called racist. And so he is demanding justice. And there’s a disgrace, alcoholic author, Peter Fallow, who’s a British guy trying to regain his reputation. And he stokes this outrage of a conspiracy that some Wall Street guy ran over this poor black kid for no reason whatsoever. And he’s a racist and evil and all these elements come together. And then there is a district attorney who’s a Jewish guy, Kramer, and he is trying to sleep with a girl who was on one of his juries and impress her in the jury box. So he wants to bring the guy who ran over this kid to Justice will bend the rules to do that. And it turns into this huge legal fiasco. And McCoy’s life slowly begins to unravel throughout all of this, that once he was this privileged jerk, he’s just a S sniffling. No one in this is good. But what’s interesting is how it reflects just the grimy fakeness of New York in the late eighties. There’s particular scene I love where they’re at a dinner party and Wolf describes how everybody laughs and it’s so annoying how they laugh. And she laughed with a percussive.
(05:30):
The way he describes how everybody laughs is like the typical thing at a Hoy toy. Posh plays, everyone laughs, but they’re clearly being fake and it is just grading to have to think about. And all the characters are really interesting, but none of them are likable. Fallow is clearly trying to regain his lost career and he’s a wreck, but he’s also British and looks down on everyone else. And so it makes it interesting to have his perspective. Maria is McCoy’s love interest, and she’s also two-faced, and it’s sad. He also has a daughter and he’s trying to care for her as well. But he basically neglects her in all of this while trying to be a good person, not really trying to be a good person. He’s trying to just get away with everything. The end of the story is, oh, and by the way, also driving around, I love the scenes.
(06:17):
They describe how all the Wall Street traders wait for their private cars to pick them up because nobody in their right mind would use the subway In New York in the 1980s, it was really Giuliani who cleaned up New York in the nineties that changed. You do not go to New York in the 1980s for a tourist visit. Now it’s gotten dangerous again with all the crazy people on the subways and stuff, but you don’t go there. So I love how it describes everything. It’s just really interesting in that regard. I’m not going to give away the ending here, but it’s a drab ending. Nobody comes out really on top or good or anything like that, but it’s an interesting character study and it’s a good well-written story. And Wolf even went to traitors to learn about it. He spent time down at, what do you call the courthouse and police processing to really understand everything that’s going on.
(07:07):
So it makes for a really interesting book if you can trudge your way through. It’s a really good book. It’s a good book. It’s a good story. So then people, a lot of directors are like, we can’t turn this into a movie. How would we do that? It’s long. It’s really long. It’s not that complex of a plot, but there’s a lot of description, a lot of important scenes in it. Like I said, it’s almost 700 pages, but then De Palma tried, and there’s actually on Turner Classic movies, there’s a podcast that actually different seasons they do behind the scenes. And there’s one that is just an expose on bonfire to the vanities of the 1990 film and how much of a mess it was trying to make this film and why it failed. Right now, the film, the 1990s film has a 15% on Rotten Tomatoes released in 1990.
(07:55):
And why did it fail? I would say the number one reason that the film failed was, well, the source material itself. It’s not something that lends itself while the film, because like I said, everybody in it is unsympathetic. There’s no one you can really root for, but if you’re going to be true to the story, and that creates a dissonance about it, it was hopelessly miscast was the problem. So the main character, Sherman McCoy, is this privileged unlikeable jerk who tries to work the system and you don’t like him. Now, you can make films about unlikeable people in the founder, Michael Keaton is really the bad guy of the film. It’s the story about Ray Croc founder of McDonald’s. But it’s fascinating to see how he progresses in his machinations. So it’s a really good film in that regard. But so McCoy’s not a good guy, but who did they cast to play him?
(08:42):
Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks is an amazing actor, but the one role Tom Hanks cannot play unlikeable. Think about it, what Charact does Tom Hanks play? He was in Splash. He’s in big, he’s Woody. Woody is not the, well, what’s funny is Woody becomes unlikable a bit, but he’s still a really likable person you want to root for, but it’s a horrible caster. McCoy, and then they’re Peter fallow. Peter Fallow is supposed to be this alcoholic out of touch Brit, and because he’s British, when he goes and interviews people about, well, what was life like for this kid in Harlem? Or I think he was in Harlem or in the Bronx. He’s in school trying hard, but it’s just a mess. And he doesn’t quite get in the book. He comes from Uppercrust British society, but they didn’t hire a Brit to do fallow for the film. De Palmer thought like British people. I did a film before that failed and there was a British character and I didn’t like him.
(09:42):
So instead they hired Bruce Willis, Bruce Willis, and it’s told from Fallows perspective. And so it’s so really bizarre. Also, they really tone down how Reverend Bacon was just as corrupt. It goes to being a weird morality tale that doesn’t go anywhere that much. They change a lot to try to make McCoy’s character more sympathetic, but a lot of it just ends up falling flat. And then they also cheat out that in the book everybody’s corrupt and crooked. But in the movie, they decide to have Morgan Freeman, lack of twine, lack of twine play the judge in the courtroom who dresses everybody down with one of his typical Morgan Freeman’s speeches, which is absent from the book entirely. Melanie Griffith is fine. As Maria Ruskin though, I thought it was really hard to take her seriously doing that Southern Bell accent, but I guess she was trying really hard with that.
(10:38):
But all in all, you lose a lot of the nuance that when you watch the movie, you’ll just be like, oh, it was okay. I guess when you read the book, you just see this great story. You see element, you’re like, oh, I remember that from the book. But it’s all chopped up and thrown onto celluloid. It’s not like a cohesive hole that really gets into each of the characters and everybody’s there. And like I said, then it ends with, it’s a weird redemption arc from McCoy when I prefer the bitter ending that he gets what he deserves in the novel itself. So that was just my little mini review today, finally got through that book. I think you may find it interesting. Don’t watch the movie. If you are going to watch the movie, read the book first so the source material is better.
(11:15):
That’s all the advice I have for you all. So, oh, I was also going to say, if you read the book by the way, it will feel like mid two thousands Black Lives Matter, race arguments. It will sound very, very, very familiar where you’ll see the cynicism, the political maneuvering, especially those Reverend Bacon and others, just like the rhetoric we saw with Black Lives Matter and a lot of that. So really, really interesting in that respect. So just for that to see that history kind of repeats itself, you’ll find interesting. Bonfire of the Vanities, read The Wolf 1987 novel, the movie. It’s a good compare and contrast I guess, if you get through the book. So thank you guys so much and I hope you have a very blessed weekend.