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The Bonfire of the Vanities
Maligned for years by cinema historians as one of the worst movies ever made, I did find the 1990 film version of Tom Wolfe's best selling novel to be an overwrought and logic defying soap opera pretending to tackle serious subjects but becomes silly due to hyperactive direction, a confusing, swiss cheese screenplay and some overripe performances...oh, and it goes on forever.
Sherman McCoy (Tom Hanks) is a married Wall Street hotshot who is having an affair with a ditzy trophy wife named Maria Ruskin (Melanie Griffith) who find themselves in the middle of an embarrassing incident on a dark Brooklyn street one evening with Maria behind the wheel of Sherman's Mercedes, which climaxes with a young black teenager getting hit with the car and slipping into a coma. Eventually, the DA and the police are able to determine that Sherman's car was involved in the incident while he tries to keep Maria's name out of it while she nonchalantly leaves the country.
Enter Peter Fallow (Bruce Willis), a writer whose career is on the verge of a complete collapse who is offered a renaissance when this story falls in his lap and he decides to write a series of articles about the case that find Peter rising in his own celebrity circle while Sherman's cozy Park Avenue existence begins to completely unravel.
Let me start of by saying that I have never read the book upon which the film was based and I have a feeling that was a mistake. I'm not sure why, but instincts tell me that the novel Tom Wolfe wrote is nothing like what ended up on the screen here. There is the genesis of a really important movie here, but Michael Cristofer's screenplay and Brian DePalma's direction almost seem to be in the matter of a farce, almost as if they're making light of Wolfe's novel. Nothing that happens in this movie is done with a straight face, everything that happens in this movie comes off as over the top and unintentionally funny, despite the fact that what happens to this Sherman McCoy character is not funny at all.
Watching the decay of the McCoy character starts of as kind of sad, but starts being unintentionally funny. There is a scene where Sherman realizes the police are closing in on him and after being questioned, goes to the opera with his wife the next night and he is literally sweating bullets and can't sit still like a restless child. The way Hanks plays this scene reminded me of Rodney Dangerfield constantly pulling on his shirt collar and once Sherman gets arrested he literally turns into Forrest Gump, a character Hanks hadn't even played yet. Sherman's brain is literally removed for the rest of the movie.
I also found Peter Fallow's narration of the story rather condescending and seeming to make fun of the trouble that Sherman was in. I find it hard to believe that this was the intent of Tom Wolfe's novel. This movie seems to make fun of Sherman instead of sympathizing with him. And don't even get me started on the ridiculous courtroom scenes where nothing resembles anything in the neighborhood of realism.
Even the performances were a bit much...Hanks' performance as Sherman McCoy was pretty much like Forrest Gump on tranquilizers and Melanie Griffith created one of cinema's most annoying and idiotic leading ladies. There are some impressive actors in the supporting cast trying to keep their head above this hot mess, including Saul Rubinek as the whiny Assistant DA, Kim Cattral as Sherman's icy wife, Morgan Freeman as the judge, John Hancock as an Al Sharpton-based minister, and F. Murray Abraham as the DA, but this movie just feels like Brian De Palma is poking fun at Tom Wolfe's book.
Maligned for years by cinema historians as one of the worst movies ever made, I did find the 1990 film version of Tom Wolfe's best selling novel to be an overwrought and logic defying soap opera pretending to tackle serious subjects but becomes silly due to hyperactive direction, a confusing, swiss cheese screenplay and some overripe performances...oh, and it goes on forever.
Sherman McCoy (Tom Hanks) is a married Wall Street hotshot who is having an affair with a ditzy trophy wife named Maria Ruskin (Melanie Griffith) who find themselves in the middle of an embarrassing incident on a dark Brooklyn street one evening with Maria behind the wheel of Sherman's Mercedes, which climaxes with a young black teenager getting hit with the car and slipping into a coma. Eventually, the DA and the police are able to determine that Sherman's car was involved in the incident while he tries to keep Maria's name out of it while she nonchalantly leaves the country.
Enter Peter Fallow (Bruce Willis), a writer whose career is on the verge of a complete collapse who is offered a renaissance when this story falls in his lap and he decides to write a series of articles about the case that find Peter rising in his own celebrity circle while Sherman's cozy Park Avenue existence begins to completely unravel.
Let me start of by saying that I have never read the book upon which the film was based and I have a feeling that was a mistake. I'm not sure why, but instincts tell me that the novel Tom Wolfe wrote is nothing like what ended up on the screen here. There is the genesis of a really important movie here, but Michael Cristofer's screenplay and Brian DePalma's direction almost seem to be in the matter of a farce, almost as if they're making light of Wolfe's novel. Nothing that happens in this movie is done with a straight face, everything that happens in this movie comes off as over the top and unintentionally funny, despite the fact that what happens to this Sherman McCoy character is not funny at all.
Watching the decay of the McCoy character starts of as kind of sad, but starts being unintentionally funny. There is a scene where Sherman realizes the police are closing in on him and after being questioned, goes to the opera with his wife the next night and he is literally sweating bullets and can't sit still like a restless child. The way Hanks plays this scene reminded me of Rodney Dangerfield constantly pulling on his shirt collar and once Sherman gets arrested he literally turns into Forrest Gump, a character Hanks hadn't even played yet. Sherman's brain is literally removed for the rest of the movie.
I also found Peter Fallow's narration of the story rather condescending and seeming to make fun of the trouble that Sherman was in. I find it hard to believe that this was the intent of Tom Wolfe's novel. This movie seems to make fun of Sherman instead of sympathizing with him. And don't even get me started on the ridiculous courtroom scenes where nothing resembles anything in the neighborhood of realism.
Even the performances were a bit much...Hanks' performance as Sherman McCoy was pretty much like Forrest Gump on tranquilizers and Melanie Griffith created one of cinema's most annoying and idiotic leading ladies. There are some impressive actors in the supporting cast trying to keep their head above this hot mess, including Saul Rubinek as the whiny Assistant DA, Kim Cattral as Sherman's icy wife, Morgan Freeman as the judge, John Hancock as an Al Sharpton-based minister, and F. Murray Abraham as the DA, but this movie just feels like Brian De Palma is poking fun at Tom Wolfe's book.