The Screengrab : the bonfire of the vanities

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.

Long Live the New Flesh!: Top 12 Real Bodily Transformations on Film, Part 2

Peter Smith — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 22:00:00 GMT

RENEE ZELLWEGER in BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY (2001) and BRIDGET JONES: EDGE OF REASON (2004)

Was it 20 pounds she gained? Was it 30? Sure, it's one thing when a guy decides to pack on some extra weight for a role, but when Zellweger decided to beef up to play the title role as Helen Fielding's zaftig, romantically-challenged heroine — on two separate occasions, no less — you'd have though from the reaction that her sacrifice was the cinematic equivalent of Ronnie Lott cutting off the tip of a finger to play in a football game. Her rounder figure — along with a surprisingly decent British accent — helped make Zellweger more convincing in the role, but here's the depressing reality: even at somewhere between 140 and 150 pounds, she wasn't exactly outside the normal, healthy body weight for a woman of her size and frame. No wonder the character is so screwed up.

KEANU REEVES in LITTLE BUDDHA (1993)

Don't laugh. Seriously. The idea of Keanu playing Siddhartha in Bernardo Bertolucci's epic about the life of the Buddha has fueled many a one-liner (though let it be noted that since then the actor has played a rather surprising number of Chosen Ones, so obviously Bertolucci was on to something). Perhaps it was in anticipation of such skepticism that Reeves went all-out for the role, actually choosing to not eat for a lengthy period of time to better recreate the image of Siddhartha after his momentous fast. Indeed, if more people had seen the movie, they might have garnered more respect for the young actor. You thought this dude was thin before? Check him out here.

SYLVESTER STALLONE in COP LAND (1996)

When an actor feels pressured to live up to his own image (forty-eight vials of human growth hormone, anyone?), is it surprising that the public was so resistant to seeing him at less the perfect physical condition? With his legacy as Rocky and Rambo firmly (get it, firmly) established, movie goers expected "Sylvester Stallone" + "cop" to equal "muscles" + "action." Stallone gained forty pounds (mmm, IHOP…) and accepted SAG minimum to play the role of the shy, gentle, hearing-impaired cop Freddy, but the public just wouldn't embrace him that way. Even a cast rounded out by De Niro, Keitel, and Liotta — and pumped up by a Miramax hype machine which had just recently become fully operational — couldn't force the film into viewer's hearts. It was a risk Stallone needed to take as an actor, but with five kids, a wife, and a magazine launch to support, he ultimately returned to his free weights and the franchises that made his fame and fortune.

PETER O'TOOLE in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

In Nicolas Wapshott's snippy biography of the legendary Peter O'Toole, the author claims that producer Sam Spiegel and director David Lean pressured the actor into getting a rhinoplasty to narrow his nose, in order to more closely resemble his character in Lawrence of Arabia. While it's indisputable from photographic evidence that O'Toole did indeed get some work done on his booze-reddened honker around this time, it was likely his own decision — even leaving aside the fact that it's an awful lot to ask of someone to get elective surgery to play a single role, how dedicated to verisimilitude could Lean and Spiegel have possibly been? After all, O'Toole, at nearly 6'3", was a full ten inches taller than the diminutive T.E Lawrence, but it's not very likely that David Lean asked his leading man to get his shins lopped off for the role. Still, as physical transformations go, it might not have been the most dramatic, but its occurrence in such a big movie with such a big star is noteworthy, coming only a few years after Charlton Heston was being sponged down with bodypaint to play a Mexican in Touch of Evil. Goodness knows what they would have asked of Marlon Brando if he'd gotten the part; Anthony Perkins, who was also considered, probably would have required a full Adam's apple transplant.

GEORGE CLOONEY in SYRIANA (2004)

New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis once wrote that, by roping Brad Pitt into the Danny Ocean movies, George Clooney relieved himself of "of the burden of being the most beautiful man in the room." It is a burden that Clooney has happily relieved himself of whenever possible. In the ensemble-cast political drama Syriana, which he co-produced, Clooney plays one of those intelligence experts who knows more than anybody else about what's going on in the Middle East but cannot get any of the higher-ups to listen to him because his gruff manner and realistic views harsh their buzz. To play the part, he let his beard grow out and gained just enough weight to take himself out of the "Hell-lo, gorgeous!" league. The change gives him an air of authentic-seeming physical discomfort, which pays off brilliantly in the scene where he fluffs a job interview and the in the image of him, shirtless and barefoot, regaining consciousness on a bathroom floor after torture: he looks painfully vulnerable but too pathetic to bother killing off. The experience seems to have served him well; in the current Michael Clayton, in which he plays a big law firm's unloved, overmortgaged fixer, he shows that he can now play the overqualified loser role without the physical baggage.

MARLON BRANDO in THE TEAHOUSE OF THE AUGUST MOON (1956) and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

In his blazing youth, Marlon Brando sometimes made very odd decisions in his choice of roles, but even when all the odds were stacked against him, he always brought total commitment to the train-wreck site. When John Patrick's once-loved, painfully whimsical play was brought to the screen, Brando insisted on playing the Japanese interpreter Sakini, a narrator figure who keeps talking to the audience and dispensing cutesy aphorisms in a mincing fake-Asian dialect. Brando's seriousness of purpose is evident in his starved appearance: he went on a crash diet and whittled himself down alarmingly for the part so that Glenn Ford and the others playing American military men could loom over him appropriately. He doesn't give a terrible performance—he does a number of clever things, and he keeps his energy level amazingly high, considering that he must have felt like passing out every time he walked past the catering area — but after the viewer recovers from the initial shock, he may wonder why Brando thought this material was worth the sacrifice. Twenty years later, Brando had reason to feel that he had nothing left to prove, and to prove that, he used the set of Apocalypse Now to unveil the mountainous physical condition that we know think of as Late Brando. The actor would later go on to do some remarkable things in that condition, but he was still self-conscious about his weight gain and hadn't yet mastered his new body as an actor. Having single-handedly scuttled Francis Ford Coppola's original conception of Colonel Kurtz as a man so divorced from physical pleasure that he was a gaunt, haggard, living ghost, he balked at the director's attempt to reconceive the role as a bloated, belching voluptuary. In the end, all Coppola could do with him was let him babble whatever came into his head while shooting him concealed in shadows and hope for the best. We will long argue about the lessons of Marlon Brando's career, but this much seems clear enough: whether he was giving it his all or just watching the clock while waiting for his paycheck to clear, he didn't get to be Marlon Brando by doing anything half-way.

CHRISTIAN BALE in THE MACHINIST (2004)

Brad Anderson's psychological thriller aims for a surreal, nightmarish feel in its story about an insomniac repressing a terrible secret, but nothing in Anderson's bag of visual tricks is as disturbing as the appearance of its star: to convey the effects of stress and sleeplessness on his character, Bale lost more than sixty pounds over the course of four months, taking his weight down to 120 pounds. Reportedly he wanted to go down to a neat one-hundred pounds, but Anderson talked him out of it. Thank God he did; with his facial features sunken and gnarled, the skin tightly fitted around his skeletal structure, Bale looks like something you could cut your hand on. If the way he looks were the product of some special make-up technique, it might be awe-inspiring, but knowing that it's really his body both makes and undermines the movie. He's the creepiest thing in it, yet you're too worried that he could keel over at any minute to concentrate on the story.

HONORABLE MENTION:

MELANIE GRIFFITH in THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES (1990)

Some physical transformations have proven worth it; some, not so much. Some have been valuable investments of time on the parts of the actors, who have used a change in their bodies as part of their creative process; some have verged on neurotic acts of self-mutilation. But Melanie Griffith's attempt to go above and beyond the call of duty on The Bonfire of the Vanities is in a category all its own: it's mainly notable for the way the actress, who at the time was a fifteen-year veteran of Hollywood moviemaking at age thirty-three, seems to have gotten her personal and professional calendars mixed up. Playing a gazillionaire's tarty mistress, a role that required her to appear in a succession of low-cut gowns, Griffith decided that it would be a good idea to get breast enhancement surgery during a break from shooting, when half her scenes were in the can and she still had more to shoot. According to Julie Salomon's indispensable book The Devil's Candy, the movie's director, Brian De Palma, was notified of the big change in his leading lady when she returned to the set and sat in his lap; she beamed at him and waited for a compliment on her new chassis while the crew goggled and he tried to smile while wondering how he was going to match shots. Oddly, Griffith continues to show a disatisfaction with what God and Tippi Hedren gave her that some might say borders on rank ingratitude; she recently did her part to get the TV series Viva Laughlin pulled off the air by scaring the viewers with her new lips, which look as if they were drawn by Max Fleischer.

– Pazit Cahlon, Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce, Scott Renshaw