The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990)

"There are people demonstrating outside our building! Black people with basketballs! You're putting everyone at risk!"

I came into this knowing little to nothing about this movie. I'd heard the title before, and it probably stuck in my head at some point because it's a catchy sort of title and I wasn't really clear on what it meant. To be honest, I had no idea Tom Hanks was in it; I honestly didn't know about any of the A‑listers who make up the cast. There's probably a very good reason for that, but I'll get to it in a bit.

The events unfold through the narration of one Peter Farrow (a very Moonlighting-esque Bruce Willis), who is shown at the very beginning of the film to be a highly successful, if perpetually drunk, author. He arrives at a ritzy gala to promote his novel, The Real McCoy and the Forgotten Lamb, where he is fawned over by PR reps, the press, and the public at large. In voiceover, Farrow begins to tell the story of how he rose to fame thanks to the misfortune of Sherman McCoy (Hanx), a Wall Street hotshot who took a wrong turn on the expressway and found himself at the epicenter of an all-out war of race and privilege.

I didn't think I'd find a Tom Hanks character I'd like less than Rick Gassko of Bachelor Party. From early on, Sherman McCoy easily takes the lead in that race. Early in the film, we learn that Sherman is stepping out on his emotionally fragile socialite spouse, Judy (Kim Cattrall), with a trophy wife named Maria Ruskin (Melanie Griffith). Had we had the opportunity to see Sherman interact with his wife more prior to learning of his infidelity, we might have felt some slight amount of sympathy for him based upon Judy's histrionics. As it is, Judy's emotional outbursts are the direct result of her knowledge of Sherman's affair, and one can hardly blame her for that. Failing that, one might feel compelled to understand Sherman's temptation if the object of his illicit affections weren't a vapid nymphomaniac with all the personality of a Styrofoam cup (and judging by the size of those implants, probably about as biodegradable). Given all that, I found myself completely unable to understand Sherman, much less find him in the least bit likeable. But I suppose that was probably the filmmakers' intent.

Trouble arrives for Sherman when he's on one of his clandestine drives with Maria, and her incessant sexual advances distract him into making a wrong turn and ending up in the Bronx at night. When he gets out of the car to remove an obstruction in the road, he's approached by two young black men, whom both he and Maria, being cultured upper-class white folk, instantly assume to be trouble. Maria jumps into the driver's seat and in a panic hits one of the young men, urging Sherman into the passenger seat, and takes off. When they reach their customary rendezvous point, an illegally sublet apartment belonging to Maria's friend Caroline, a nervous Sherman suggests calling the police. Maria immediately shoots him down, dictating that since she was the one driving the car, she gets to make the call, and she has no intentions of outing herself as both Sherman's mistress and the perpetrator of a felony hit-and-run.

Meanwhile, the stricken youth, Henry Lamb, is taken to a hospital and gives a description of his assailant, a white man, along with the model of the car and the first two digits of the license plate before he lapses into a coma. This sparks an outrage among the black community in the Bronx, who look to the charismatic Reverend Bacon to spearhead their crusade for justice. District Attorney Abe Weiss, finding himself directly in Bacon's crosshairs and desperately wanting to assure his black constituents' votes in his upcoming bid for mayor, embarks on a crusade to find the culprit. As the noose tightens, Sherman finds his world spiraling rapidly out of control. And lurking in the shadows all the while, creating scandalous headlines to fuel the fire, is Peter Farrow.

Reception for the film was tepid at best. It made only a $15 million return on its $47 million budget, and renowned film critic Leonard Maltin panned it in his annual Movie Guide, giving it a "BOMB" rating. Rotten Tomatoes has since given it a score of 16% on the Tomatometer. To compare, Son-in-Law earned a 21%. It's a bad day when you come in behind Pauly Shore.

So what went wrong? Personally, I've got a few theories, and it starts with the characters themselves. There aren't a whole lot of people who come out of this whole thing looking good. With the exception of Morgan Freeman's Judge Leonard White, everyone has an ulterior motive, and it can be exhausting not knowing who to root for or sympathize with. It's one thing to read a book filled with these kinds of characters, when one can put the tome down and engage in something a little more mindless when the players lack substance and the plot seems to have entirely too much. It's quite another to ask an audience to sit through 126 minutes of heavy-handed moral preaching by way of people it's almost impossible to like.

The camera work is also problematic. Brian De Palma seems intent on playing cinematography bingo from the outset, opening with a Steadicam shot following Farrow on his arrival at and trek through the World Trade Center for his big premiere. Then come the arc shots, in which the camera rotates around the subject (think Carrie White dancing at the prom or Neo dodging Agent Smith's bullets in The Matrix), but there doesn't seem to have been much thought given to when or how they're used. This perspective is meant to emphasize the drama in pivotal moments, and De Palma blows through his quota in the first 20 minutes of the film. At times the film is shot at a low angle - Steven Spielberg used this technique perfectly in E.T., so as to capture the action from the perspective of a child, but I can't imagine why it would be employed here. The fishbowl technique comes up later, and I'm still scratching my head over that one. There are several other bizarre angles and techniques that just don't seem to make any sense, which if you've studied anything about filmmaking come across as sloppy; if you haven't, they're just jarring.

And then there's Melanie Griffith. I have never liked Melanie Griffith, and it's a complete mystery to me how someone with such horrendous delivery was ever nominated for an Oscar. To be fair, Maria Ruskin is given perhaps the worst lines in the history, including such gems as:

·       "Don't you want some poon tang first?"

·       "Oh, Sherman, you know I'm a sucker for a soft dick."

·       "Fuck the luggage. Let's get a drink."

Griffith seems painfully intent on evoking Marilyn Monroe, but she merely parrots the airy, sultry delivery that was the blonde bombshell's trademark without any of the latent undercurrent of grit she was known for. Maria Ruskin is intended to be vacuous and insipid on the surface, but cunning as a serpent in her manipulation of Sherman and the other characters. Instead, Griffith is the frightening bargain basement department store Santa Claus with the flimsy costume that smells suspiciously of stale cigarette smoke, and her presence really doesn't do the film or the message it's trying to convey any favors. A shame, really – the producers reportedly wanted Michelle Pfeiffer in the sexpot role, but she turned them down. Uma Thurman was also highly favored by De Palma over Griffith for the part, but it was Hanx (WHY?) who apparently felt uncomfortable with Thurman's relative inexperience and encouraged De Palma to choose Griffith instead. Oops.

On the other hand, if anyone can bring vulnerability and sympathy to a flawed antihero like Sherman McCoy, it is without a doubt Tom Hanks. True, there's very little to relate to in the financial hotshot we see in the beginning, but as Sherman's layers of security are gradually worn away, he becomes more relatable, more human. If nothing else came of this movie, it marked a turning point for Hanks in his career. Never had he played a character so self-involved and oblivious to his own privilege who still somehow manages to find a redemption in his downfall. While he'd certainly tackled dramatic roles before, this one in particular was somehow more genuine for his flaws, and is never more real than when he's hit rock bottom, as evidenced in his interaction with Farrow on a subway train after his arraignment. Sherman has no idea that he's sitting next to the very man who crafted the headlines that effectively brought him to his knees, and he bares his soul to the writer. When Farrow remarks on Sherman's disheveled appearance and the smell emanating from him, Sherman confesses, "I think I pissed my pants in the holding cell." It's a very raw, very real moment that's rare and oddly satisfying to see when the average middle-class viewer imagines the same happening to other white-collar criminals we perceive to have evaded justice. At the same time, it's a stark reminder that even the mightiest among us is vulnerable, and indeed Sherman finds himself an unwitting representative of all that the impoverished minorities in the Bronx see as soulless and wrong about the (usually white) upper class. The message in and of itself is a powerful one, and is astonishingly appropriate in today's culture – one wonders how the film might do if it were re-released today, if only we could persuade today's equivalent of Michelle Pfeiffer (Amanda Seyfreid comes to mind) to sign on for the role.

Ultimately, Sherman is exonerated, thanks to an illegally-obtained tape of Maria confessing to the crime that he plays for the court which Sherman falsely claims as his (as his father encourages him, "If the truth won't set you free, then lie"). In Farrow's closing remarks, he states that no one ever heard from Sherman McCoy again – while he is no longer wanted for a crime, his reputation has been irreparably damaged, his finances doubtless drained by his legal fees and his divorce settlement, he's been fired from his job after underperforming due to the stress of the trial - and one can only assume that he's chosen to live a more modest existence away from the upper echelons of the Manhattan elite that he now finds himself thoroughly disgusted with. Aside from Maria (whom we unfortunately don't get the satisfaction of seeing soiling herself in a prison cell), the remainder of the cast of characters can be seen at Farrow's grand gala in the final scene. Abe Weiss beams at Farrow as he takes the stage – he has delivered the white scapegoat the Bronx cried out for and is in all likelihood poised to win his election; Bacon and his supporters, including Henry Lamb's family, are in the process of suing the hospital treating Henry for malpractice; and Farrow himself is made famous by his extensive coverage of the story. The fate of Henry himself is never revealed, and for the purposes of this story, it apparently doesn't matter. Lamb is little more than a means to an end, and for all but Sherman and himself, it's a profitable one.