THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1991 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: DePalma echoes some things worth saying, amplifies some things that are not, twists the tone of the Wolfe book, and makes the audience seasick in the process. With over-rated boxoffice stars such as Hanks, Griffith, and Willis, he stacked the deck against himself. Rating: low 0 (-4 to +4).
THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES is an occasionally audacious comedy with a large number of grievous faults. Many of those faults would either disappear or would be outweighed by the film's virtues if this had been an original screenplay and there had not already been a novel with a similar plot and identical title written by Tom Wolfe. As an adaptation of a novel, Brian DePalma's film and Michael Cristofer's screenplay are a total botch. As a film that stands by itself, it has some very nice touches and is only a partial botch. Any film that sets out to point out social ills and has something to offend nearly everybody cannot be all bad, but a comedy that ends with some dignified character summing up the film and making a sermon for more "decency" at the end has a hard time being all good either. In the 1950s and 1960s a Spencer Tracy or perhaps a Henry Fonda could sermonize and it would work. Here it is like getting to the bottom of an ice cream sundae and finding a chunk of prime rib.
The story of THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES has much the same world-view as Billy Wilder's excellent ACE IN THE HOLE (known on television as THE BIG CARNIVAL). Each is a story of a human mishap and a large number of people professing only the best of intent swarming to it like sharks to serve their own self-seeking ends. In this case, the mishap occurs when Wall Street wizard Sherman McCoy (played by Tom Hanks) is driving his mistress home from the airport, misses an exit, and must drive through an unfriendly part of the Bronx. They are trapped in a probable mugging attempt. They try to escape with mistress Maria Ruskin unknowingly backing McCoy's car into one of the muggers. An alcoholic reporter, Peter Fallow (played by Bruce Willis), desperately needing a big story blows this one into big headlines. Also, a black minister, the Reverend Bacon (played by John Hancock), whose resemblance to the Reverend Al Sharpton is "purely coincidental," decides to use the incident for political grist. Soon a whole circus of vultures is preying on the incident from all angles, blowing it into a major racial incident.
And from all angles is exactly how DePalma chose to film BONFIRE. DePalma has often used interesting camera angles to add atmosphere to a scene. Here he does it by far too often and for often inexplicable reasons. The audience watches a phone conference from the ceiling of a room looking straight down. There is no explanation to the viewer of what he or she is doing on the ceiling.
The film actually has a cast which includes some very fine actors such as Morgan Freeman, F. Murray Abraham, Donald Moffat, Robert Stephens, and Andre Gregory. Medium-weight notables include Saul Rubinek, a clever comic actor misused here. Then there are some dead-weight actors apparently on hand for boxoffice value. These include Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, and Melanie Griffith. Perhaps a good director could squeeze a good performance if they were perfectly cast. Here they are not, and DePalma is not that good a director. Hanks is wooden and evokes little emotion from the role. Griffith is once again quite good at taking off her clothes, but her ability to do a Southern sexpot named Maria is beyond her ability. She does not look like a Maria and her Southern accent is forced. The accent also probably changed in the course of filming and in her first scene in the film her voice sounded crudely overdubbed. Then there is Bruce Willis. His flat acting did not get in the way of the "Die Hard" films. About the only film he would be well-cast in would be THE BRUCE WILLIS STORY, and even there it is questionable if he could really get into the character.
With more smoke than fire, THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES never ignites. I give it a low 0 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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