The Screengrab : rolling stone

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.

Insufficently Forgotten Films: "The Big Fix" (1978)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

THE MOVIE: This post-counterculture private eye movie stars Richard Dreyfuss, who also served as co-producer, as thirtysomething West Coast shamus Moses Wine. Back in the glory days of the '60s student protests of which the young Moses was a part, he had a thing going on with a blonde rad-lib played by Susan Anspach. Now, she's working for a California gubernatorial candidate who is being targeted by a smear campaign; someone is seeking to tar him by claiming that he's associated with supposedly scary figures from that period, including fictionalized stand-ins for Abbie Hoffman ("Howard Eppis", played by F. Murray Abraham) and Cesar Chavez. Wine, a recent divorcee who makes wisecracks while his heart is breaking, investigates the smears while reflecting on how neither adulthood nor America has turned out quite the way he envisioned. In the course of his investigation, he discovers that the "violent radical" and fugitive from justice Eppis is hiding in plain sight with a wife and kids in a tract house, having settled down under a false name and joined the rush to collect all the "goodies" he can from the System.

WHY IT DESERVES TO BE FORGOTTEN: It's a pitiful mess. The director, Jeremy Paul Kagen, came up through directing for TV, and after a brief spree making such feature films as The Chosen, The Sting II (the one where the roles originated by Paul Newman and Robert Redford are passed to the obvious second choices, Jackie Gleason and Mac Davis), and Big Man on Campus (also known as The Hunchback Hairball of L.A.--when you've got two potential titles as charming as these, how can you decide?), it was to directing for TV that he scuttled back. For a while there, Kagen seemed to be having a lot of trouble getting the sixties out of his system: one of his TV films was the 1975 Katherine, in which a pre-Carrie Sissy Spacek played a rich girl who developed a social conscience and became a member of the radical underground, and his first theatrical feature, 1977's Heroes, starred Henry Winkler, in a failed bid to be recognized as something other than Fonzie, as a (get this) Vietnam vet (got that?) who, having been made lovably wacky by his traumatizing war experiences, travels cross country to reconnect with his old war buddies and start a worm farm. (He chatters baby talk while his heart is breaking. And while the audience is puking.) A decade later, Kagen would restage the Chicago 8 trial for a 1987 TV film called Conspiracy.

The Big Fix was one of the first Hollywood films pitched at an audience of people who'd grown up during the '60s and who thought they were changing the world at the time but now found themselves entering their thirties with kids and mortgages and stable jobs and friends who were getting ready to vote for Reagan (or even, shudder, entertaining the thought of voting for him themselves) and who might respond to entertainment that helped them find their bearings. Five years later, The Big Chill would clean up playing to that demographic, as would, another five years down the line, the TV series thirtysomething. Both of those laid their concerns right out on the table without the genre sweetening of a private-eye thriller. And both were much, much, much better made than The Big Fix. I've never met Jeremy Paul Kagen and don't really know anything about him but his filmography, but I think it must be safe to conclude that he's a hell of a nice guy, because anyone who's been entrusted to bring in a major feature film and proven himself as incompetent at making a complicated plot and key actions lucid and coherent as Kagen's work here would have been driven out of the business pretty quick if people weren't rooting for him. Of course, nobody ever walked out of Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep fuming in disgust because he couldn't figure out who killed the chauffeur. It's a mark of how dreary Kagen's work is that a viewer has plenty of time to ruminate on how how little success he's having figuring out what's supposed to be going on.

The Big Fix also served notice to Richard Dreyfuss that his movie career might be added to the list of things that he was about to be able to regard, along with adulthood and the American political system, as personally disappointing. Dreyfuss had just enjoyed perhaps his best year ever, starring in the blockbuster Close Encounters of the First Kind and winning an Academy Award as Best Actor (for The Goodbye Girl!) Having set this project up, he must have hoped that it would be the start of a new stage in his career, but it actually announced the beginning of a long downward slide. He would only make three other movies (The Competition, Whose Life Is It Anyway?, and The Buddy System) in the nine years before he re-emerged, playing third fiddle to Nick Nolte and Bette Midler, in his next hit, Down and Out in Beverly Hills. The chastening experience of his time in Siberia seemed to have done him some good as an actor. If The Big Fix had, by whatever intervention of God or the devil, somehow been a hit, and he'd felt encouraged to go even farther in the supposedly adorable mixture of (unconvincing) self-deprecating humor and tear-stained lonely-boy heroics that he was peddling here, things could have gotten really gross really fast.

WHY, FOR SOME PEOPLE, IT CAN NEVER POSSIBLY BE FORGOTTEN ENOUGH: The character of Moses Wine was created by Roger L. Simon, for a series of mystery novels that began with two books--The Big Fix (1973) and Wild Turkey (1974)--that were first published by Straight Arrow Books, the short-lived literary imprint of Rolling Stone magazine. (Carrying on the roman a' clef element from The Big Fix, Wild Turkey included a knockoff of Rolling Stone star writer Hunter Thompson, called "Gunther Thomas.") Simon also did the screenplay for the movie, which led to a Hollywood career that includes a co-writing credit on one actual good movie, Paul Mazursky's 1989 adapatation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies, a Love Story. The most interesting thing about the first Wine novel and the movie made from it may be a shift in tone that says a lot about how much things had changed in five years: in the book, ol' Mose still harbors dreams of progressive political change, which are embodied in the candidate he's working for, but in the movie, the candidate is a doofus and all hope is dead. Moses Wine has yet to rear his frazzled head in another movie, but Simon has continued to grind out novels about him, and in 2003's Director's Cut, Wine opened the floor with the announcement, "I knew I was in trouble when I was starting to agree with John Ashcroft-- me a lifelong card-carrying left/liberal and graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, who had espoused every so-called progressive cause from anti-nuke to pro-choice to saving the West Indian manatee, arrested at a half dozen demonstrations and bashed over the head by at least as many cops, nodding approvingly at the utterances of our Attorney General..." Wine goes on to explain that his "political about-face" is a "symptom of the times in which we lived. Like others I wanted to help, be Rosie the Riveter or even Clarence the Computer Chip maker, but I didn't have the skills for any of that, and besides we were told to just go about our normal work, that simply being vigilant would be enough to fight terrorism, whatever that meant." What this shrugging manifesto meant was that Simon himself had been so badly scared by 9/11 that he was now a lockstep Bush supporter, and just as his earlier novels had tried to fuse the images of Jerry Rubin and Humphrey Bogart, now he was trying to inject that World War II gung-ho spirit into his bilge. At the same time he was promoting his own political about-face on-line, at his blog and his site Pajamas Media, and in profiles with conservative writers who seemed charmed to find an actual living cartoon of a decadent Hollywood liberal type who was so eager to make cartoon attacks on the left.

Simon still peddles the Moses Wine books on his website, as if, for all his blather about how wrong he was in his younger days about who the bad guys, he has no sense of shame about having set that awful hippie-smart-ass sterotype in stone and tried to pass it off as a heroic image. Maybe he doesn't. In his own writing and in interviews, Simon comes across as vain and shallow, and utterly unconcerned about sounding as if his road to Damascus moment was motivated by something more than sheer, stark terror of the Islamofascist menace; maybe he loves his younger, dopier self too much to disown it, even as he sneers at anyone who would have agreed with him at the time. It's amusing, though, that in recent weeks, the McCain campaign has appropriated the same tactic that the villains used in The Big Fix, desperately trying to link Barack Obama to members of the Weather Underground. The fact that they're trying to do that to a candidate who was in elementary school at the time makes you wonder just how scary and confusing the world is going to seem to some people when we finally reach the point that nobody cares more about "the sixties" than the present, if we ever will. If Simon had been luckier--if, say, a brick had fallen on his head on September 10, 2001, and he'd lapsed into a coma and didn't come out of it until a week after Katrina--then he might today be able to sell a few copies of The Big Fix by touting it as a dire prediction of the corruption and self-debasement of the McCain campaign, but instead, he's been one of those sad lost souls wandering from TV studio to TV studio insisting that, because of his faith in John McCain;s honor, he believes that his candidate must be too senile to know what his own campaign is doing--now, get out there and vote for him, dammit! More recently, he heaped shame upon himself by declaring "interesting" another idiot's theory that Bill Ayers ghostwrote Obama's first memoir. All this must have given Richard Dreyfuss something to chuckle about to himself as he hung around the set of Oliver Stone's W., bestowing his own Blofeldian impersonation of Dick Cheney on posterity.

Screengrab Review: "W."

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

It's not for me to offer unsolicited advice to a famous and successful filmmaker like Oliver Stone, especially when it's too late for said advice to be taken anyway – but what the hell, while I'm here I might as well tell you my idea for the movie Stone should have made instead of W. As you may have read here in the Screengrab or elsewhere in the liberal elite media, W. is a biopic of our current president, George W. Bush, who is not up for re-election and is leaving office in January no matter who wins. (Unless he barricades himself inside the Oval Office with a shotgun and a bottle of whiskey, which might have made for a good scene in W…but I'm getting ahead of myself.) As such, W. is unlikely to have a substantial effect on the upcoming election.

What if, instead, Stone had made a movie about the administration of President John McCain? Stone and his screenwriter Stanley Weiser could have cooked up a juicy, paranoid fantasia of a potential McCain Era in American history, supplemented by flashbacks from McCain's actual colorful past. It would be a similar movie in many ways; as Tom Dickinson writes in the fascinating Rolling Stone cover story "Make-Believe Maverick," McCain and Bush were both youthful fuck-ups with daddy issues, the major difference being that "George W. Bush was a much better pilot."

Our 43rd president's career as a pilot isn't covered in W. but Stone's film samples most of the greatest hits from Bush's misspent youth. We see his hazing as a Yale fraternity pledge, his inability to hold down a job for long (whether it be on a Texas oil rig or on Wall Street), his fondness for the demon alcohol, his courtship of librarian and future wife Laura (Elizabeth Banks), his baseball dreams, his sobriety and salvation, and finally his entry into "the family business." And although we don't see much of brother Jeb in the movie, it's clear that (in Stone's view, anyway) patriarch George Herbert Walker Bush (James Cromwell) sees the boy he calls "junior" as the Fredo of the family.

These blasts from the past are scattered throughout W., which primarily concerns itself with the Bush administration’s ramp-up to the war in Iraq. The film opens months after the 9/11 terror attacks, as the president and his cabinet brainstorm a catchphrase that will resonate with the American people. “Axis of hatred” falls short, but…ahhh, “Axis of Evil! I like that!” This scene plays exactly like the moment in Stone’s The Doors when Ray Manzarek dreams up the keyboard intro to “Light My Fire.” Sometimes it seems there is only one biopic in the world.

Stone’s unique brew of absurdity, paranoia and psychobabble is at its most potent in these Strangelovian war room scenes. The cast alone makes for compelling viewing, if only for the wide variety of acting approaches. As Condoleezza Rice, Thandie Newton is such a near-perfect replicant, she doesn’t come close to resembling an actual human being – she’s like something Disney shipped in from the Hall of Presidents. Jeffrey Wright is doing a voice as Colin Powell, but to the best of my recollection, it’s nothing like Powell’s actual voice. Others barely attempt any imitation at all; as the man Bush calls “Vice,” Richard Dreyfuss only once hints at Cheney’s Penguin grin, but he’s got the prince of darkness vibe down pat. When Cheney explains what the real plan is for Iraq – that is, the establishment of a new American Empire in the Middle East and Asia, with delicious black oil flowing from every pipe – W. is at its most giddily satirical and subversive.

It’s a shame the rest of it is so pedestrian. It all flows together and moves along at a brisk pace – it doesn’t feel like a movie that was shot, edited and released within the span of a baseball season – but the script is far too reductive and simple-minded. (Yes, you could argue that’s appropriate to the central character, but then you still have to sit through it.) Stone likes to be able to claim he’s depicting both sides of the story, so he appears to treat key points like W’s religious conversion and romance with Laura seriously. Then he turns around and gives us one of those classic Bushisms (“Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”) and jars us right out of the movie.

As Phil Nugent posted earlier this week, Stone had originally planned to include more black comedy and surreal elements, and I do think that might have been the more fruitful approach. To the extent that W. does work, give credit to Josh Brolin – he’s the one member of the cast who gives both a pitch-perfect impression and a genuine performance. It’s hard to play dumb and spoiled and, y’know, carelessly destructive of an entire country, and still maintain a modicum of likeability – but Bush did pull it off for a while and Brolin pulls it off here. Poor Elizabeth Banks is saddled with a conception of Laura Bush that doesn’t extend much beyond “enabling airhead,” and James Cromwell projects too much gruff gravitas to pass for the patrician elder Bush.

It all comes down to “Poppy didn’t love me best, so I’ll show him,” and even if that’s true in reality, it’s a boring cliché on the screen. And since we’re dealing with Oliver Stone, a point worth making once is worth making a hundred times, in 100-point boldface type, until not even the dimmest bulb in the audience can possibly miss it. I’m reminded of a scene in Barcelona, where a character explains that he understands subtext to mean a “hidden message or import of some kind,” but wonders what you call “the message or meaning that's right there on the surface, completely open and obvious?” That is, of course, the text – and Stone’s movies are all text all the time, right there on the surface, completely open and obvious.