The Screengrab : body double

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990, Brian De Palma)

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Of all the prestige projects of the 1990 awards season, few had more potential than The Bonfire of the Vanities. To begin with, it was based on Tom Wolfe’s first fiction book, which had been widely read in serialized form in Rolling Stone before becoming a bestseller upon its publication as a novel. The director was Brian De Palma, who made his reputation with a series of kinky, Hitchcock-inspired thrillers during the seventies before branching out into more mainstream fare such as Scarface, The Untouchables and Casualties of War. With a wildly popular novel and an A-list director, Warner Bros. had visions of Oscars dancing in their heads, and they consequently filled the cast with big names, from recent Oscar nominees Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman to newly anointed action superstar Bruce Willis, and backed them with plenty of first-rate character actors.

Ideally, The Bonfire of the Vanities should have been one of the biggest movie events of 1990. But then, if it had been, I would be writing about it in my Yesterday’s Hits column instead of When Good Directors Go Bad. As it stands, the big-screen adaptation remains one of the most notorious fiascos in Hollywood history, earning back a mere $15 million of its then-extravagant $50 million budget, and receiving mostly savage reviews. As a De Palma fan of long standing- I’m the guy who liked The Black Dahlia, after all- I’d like to say that the film was merely misunderstood, but even I have to admit that it’s a failure.

Part of the problem is the casting of the principal roles, from the top on down. If you were casting the role of an ambitious commodities trader and self-anointed “Master of the Universe”, whose name would come to mind? Michael Douglas? Tom Cruise, perhaps? But after Warner Bros. deemed the character too unsympathetic on the page, they decided to cast Tom Hanks in the role, which is sort of like casting Jimmy Stewart as Gordon Gekko. Also problematic was the casting of Willis. The character of journalist Peter Fallow was written as a dissolute Brit (the role was originally offered to John Cleese), but Willis ended up being cast for marquee value, and gave one of his laziest performances, smirking his way through the role and pissing off most of the people involved with the production with his ego.

Worst of all is Griffith. During the eighties, Griffith’s dumb-blonde persona proved to be surprisingly adaptable to a number of filmmakers’ visions, from the tart-with-a-heart of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild to the streetwise porn star of De Palma’s own Body Double. However, the role of Maria Ruskin was far beyond her limited talent. On the page, Maria may be the trickiest character in the novel, a wily manipulator whose ditzy façade hides a pitch-black heart. But Griffith can only manage the ditzy part, so when the character begins to reveal her shameless nature after Sherman’s life begins to go down the tubes we never believe it. The two halves of her personality- sexy and cunning- never mesh convincingly, so rather than lacing her manipulations with an erotic charge, her dark side makes the sexy stuff creepy, which surely wasn’t what the film was aiming for.

But while the casting issues might have been out of De Palma’s hands, he’s far from blameless. Admittedly, Wolfe’s novel is something of a tough nut to crack, simultaneously a cross-section of New York City life, a morality tale, and a savage takedown of the craven greed and ambition that fueled the eighties. However, it fails on all three counts. Much of its power as a snapshot of the Big Apple’s social strata is lost because its characters are sketchy and one-dimensional, a problem that might have been partially alleviated by spot-on casting, but not entirely. Likewise, the film places its morality tale aspects on the back burner for most of its running time, only to have judge/voice of reason Morgan Freeman bust out an extended monologue about decency in the film’s final five minutes, at which point it comes off as a tacked-on moral rather than a natural outgrowth of the story.

This leaves only the exposé aspect of the story. In nearly 700 pages, Wolfe was able to lay bare the motivations of nearly all of the major players in the story, from Sherman, Maria and Peter, to the lawyers, politicians and community leaders who opportunistically seized upon his case for their own personal gain. Without the time to do this onscreen, De Palma instead focuses on the circus (political and media-driven) that ensues. But while a more assured comic filmmaker might have been able to spin even an abbreviated Bonfire into a bitter little pill (imagine what an Ace in the Hole-era Billy Wilder might have done with this material), De Palma brings almost nothing to the material aside from the liberal use of unflattering wide-angle close-ups to underline the grotesqueness of the characters. Sure, there are a handful of cool camera tricks- especially the nearly five-minute-long opening Steadican shot- but for the most part they don’t really work in the context of the story, and mostly just call attention to themselves. I hate to use a criticism that De Palma’s detractors are wont to levy at him, but in this case, they’re right.

In the end, the biggest failing of The Bonfire of the Vanities is one of tone. The scathing satire of the original novel was replaced by a more hamfisted style that was both broad and shrill. A few of the jabs hit (I love how Andre Gregory’s poet is introduced: “he’s on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize. He has AIDS.”), but most of the time they whiff. Scenes like the one where Maria’s cuckold husband (Alan King) suddenly dies in mid-conversation or the famous “crumbs” monologue by Sherman’s wife might have worked on the page, but they flounder and die onscreen, the former because it’s not inherently funny to see a minor character kick the bucket, the latter because Kim Cattrall plays the character as such a high-strung harpy that it’s hard to focus on anything she says.

Now, it’s entirely possible that Ebert was right when he wrote that The Bonfire of the Vanities might be enjoyable to those who are unfamiliar with the book. But I wouldn’t bet on it. De Palma and the studio took a powerful and lacerating story and adapted it in the most pedestrian way possible, and replaced the prickly citizens of Wolfe’s New York City with characters who are both cartoonish and, worse, uninteresting. If anything good came out of my watching Bonfire again, it’s that I’ve been inspired to re-read the book, to immerse myself in Wolfe’s language and marvel at the world he created. By now, it’s become a cliché that people are generally better off reading the book, but in this case that’s the only way to go.

Sex Talk with Brian De Palma

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 15:30:00 GMT

It’s sex month at Premiere.com, and what better way to kick it off than an interview with the director of Redacted and Mission to Mars? OK, we can think of a few better ways too, but even De Palma detractors must admit the man has committed a steamy scene or two to celluloid in his day. “Who can forget his homage to Hitchcock in Dressed to Kill (1980) when the camera pans shortly after the film's opening credits onto Angie Dickenson's crotch as she lustfully masturbates in the steaming shower seconds before she's grabbed from behind by a shadowy male figure?” asks Karl Rozemeyer. And while I think we’re all aware that wasn’t actually Angie Dickenson’s body in the shower scene, the larger point still stands: memorable nudity enlivens even the silliest movie. And the silliest movie I can think of is De Palma’s Body Double.

The man himself doesn’t seem to be particularly comfortable discussing the subject. Favorite sex scene in a movie? “That's a good question. I think sex scenes are extremely difficult to do. I don't think I have ever really done a straightforward love scene. Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious. Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo.” Please, everyone, try to keep your pants on.

“So much of shooting sex scenes in movies you a see are naked people sort of humping each other on a bed, shot in the most unflattering way just because they happen to be naked and mimicking making love. They don't really dramatize their particular sexual attraction to each other. And it's very difficult. You have to find a way, a visual way to approach scenes like that… I am trying to think of movies with really good... there must be some classics that spring to mind.”

Clearly De Palma requires further prodding on the issue, if you’ll pardon the terminology. “Maybe Blowup or Last Tango in Paris?” Rozemeyer offers. “Blowup? Yeah, yeah. Incredibly sexy. Who was it? Veruschka [von Lehndorff]? Incredibly stunning and beautiful.” Ah, now he’s coming around. But De Palma is finally forced to concede the whole love-sex-relationship thing just isn’t his style. “What draws me to make movies is more the visual design and that is why very emotional stories between two characters — loving, complicated, dramatic — is just something my particular aesthetic is not drawn to.” Fair enough…and with visual design like this, who can really complain?

Take Five: Smut

Peter Smith — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 21:00:00 GMT

The Amateurs opens in limited release this Friday. We have absolutely no intention whatsoever of seeing it, because there is the possibility, however remote, that it will contain a nude scene featuring Joe Pantoliano. But it does give us a chance to talk about pornography. Not actual pornography, mind you — as open-minded as this site is, we're pretty sure the bosses aren't going to let us post stills of our favorite scenes from the oeuvre of the Dark Brothers. No, what we're talking about here is movies about pornography. There's been smut on film since there was film, but while Hollywood has always been officially disdainful of its little brother in the Valley, it's also been a bit fascinated as well. Recently, European filmmakers have actually included real sex in their movies and made it work as part of a respectable narrative, but in the U.S., the NC-17 rating is still the kiss of death and violence will likely always be more palatable to the censors than sex. But even in those arty Euro-flicks, the sex is in service of the story and not the other way around; will a genuine porn movie ever be made with a great script, top-notch direction and production, and big Hollywood stars? Probably not. But there will still be movies about pornography; here are five of the best.

BLUE MOVIE (1970)

Okay, technically, this isn't a real movie. It is, instead, a novel about the making of a movie. The novel is by Terry Southern, and the movie (Faces of Love) is one that Southern and his good friend, the director Stanley Kubrick, had sometimes talked of making together. It would be a big-budget Hollywood picture, with as many of the big stars of the day as they could afford and a multi-million-dollar budget — and it would contain hardcore pornography. Kubrick knew the movie could never be made in his lifetime and never pursued it, but the subversive Southern couldn't let go of the idea and fictionalized the making of the film in a hilariously filthy novel. Now, thirty-seven years later, Southern and Kubrick are both dead — and their movie has still never been made.

HARDCORE (1979)

Paul Schrader's sometimes hokey and sometimes harrowing follow-up to Blue Collar dealt with every father's recurring nightmare: seeing his missing daughter in a porno flick. Inspired partly by Schrader's own obsession with pornography (which he referenced in Taxi Driver as well), the film doesn't always manage to carry off its mix of religious fury and sleazy L.A. grit, and its central conceit (the father goes undercover as a porn producer to find his daughter) is pretty flimsy, but Hardcore is carried on the strength of a furious, consuming lead performance by George C. Scott and some terrific cameo roles by Peter Boyle, Hal Williams and Dick "Darrin" Sargent.

BODY DOUBLE (1984)

Somehow, Alfred Hitchcock never got around to making a movie set in the rented houses and storefront offices of the San Fernando Valley pornography industry. So Brian De Palma did it for him. Best described as an bizarre combination of Vertigo and Rear Window with smut and power drills thrown in for an extra bit of a kick, Body Double is, like many of De Palma's Hitchcock-homage films, a movie that's a lot smarter and better than it appears on the surface, and it rewards multiple viewings. It also features one of the filthiest — and funniest — line readings ever from a big Hollywood star: Melanie Griffith, as porn star Holly Body, explaining painstakingly to Craig Wasson's hapless character exactly what she will and will not do.

BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997)

Like most of his films, Paul Thomas Anderson's porn-industry epic Boogie Nights has its problems. It's sprawling in the worst way, its script badly needed a ruthless application of the blue pencil, and Anderson often mistakes putting people through the wringer for character development. But it's not for nothing that he's considered a major American director, and even leaving aside the tremendous cast he assembled here, he achieves many moments of genuine emotional power and perfectly captures a certain southern California milieu from the late 1970s and early 1980s.

WONDERLAND (2003)

The story of Johnny "Wadd" Holmes — one of the biggest stars in the history of porn, as well as one of its most pathetic figures — is a fascinating one, combining as it does so many juicy elements. Money, sex, death, degradation, disease and murder all played a part in Holmes' life, and every element came together in the notorious Wonderland Murders. The story of the murders was told in an abstracted way in Boogie Nights and literally in the little-seen documentary Wadd: The Life & Time of John C. Holmes, but they receive a much more direct screen treatment in Wonderland. While Val Kilmer turns in a surprisingly strong performance as Holmes, but the movie itself it chaotic, confused and shambolic — but then, as the life story of Johnny Wadd, how could it be anything but?

— Leonard Pierce