The Bonfire of the Vanities

The best thing about The Bonfire of the Vanities is that it’s not the worst movie ever made. That’s damning with faint praise, I know. But given the vitriol that greeted this film’s release, it bears saying.

The story: Tom Hanks plays Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street bond trader who takes a wrong turn into the South Bronx with his mistress, played by Melanie Griffith. She hits a local kid. They flee. The Bronx DA—up for re-election—smells opportunity. Local kingfish Reverend Bacon whips up community outrage. Alcoholic journalist Peter Fallow, played by Bruce Willis, fans the flames with incendiary prose. National circus ensues.

It’s all there. The satire. The cynicism. The New York Id on full display.

Except it isn’t.

Start with Hanks. Tom Wolfe’s Sherman McCoy is a “Master of the Universe”—ice water in his veins, million-dollar commissions, Patrick Bateman in a better suit. Hanks is a wonderful movie star, but he’s too decent for this role. We can’t buy him cheating on his wife. We can’t buy him as a cutthroat broker. He’s just too nice, and niceness is poison here.

Griffith fares no better. She doesn’t convince as the kind of woman who could make a titan risk everything. De Palma knew her from Body Double, wanted someone he and Hanks could work with. Comfort over casting. It shows.

Then there’s Willis. I’m a Bruce apologist, especially early-career Bruce. But De Palma’s decision to make the British journalist American killed the perspective. As a Brit, Peter Fallow would have natural detachment, even disdain for America’s political theater. Perfect narrator material. But Bruce’s New Jersey accent makes him just another local. The opposite of what we need.

Morgan Freeman delivers, as always. But casting him undercuts the novel’s satirical edge. In Wolfe’s book, his character, a judge, is white and Jewish. De Palma worried about optics—a white character lecturing black Bronx residents. Fair concern. Wrong solution.

The novel traffics in media-reinforced stereotypes deliberately. It’s heightened satire. The film wants it both ways: edgy commentary and feel-good resolution. That final monologue about “decency” tries to graft redemption onto cynicism.

You can’t have it both ways. Commit to the satire or commit to the melodrama. Don’t hedge.

There’s one great scene. The white Jewish D.A. explains his re-election strategy: “By November, they’re going to be thinking of me as the first black District Attorney of Bronx County.” It’s the only moment that both captures Wolfe’s savage edge and recalls early De Palma—the fearless provocateur of Greetings and Hi Mom!, especially that film’s ‘Be Black, Baby!’ sequence.

But one scene doesn’t make a movie. This is De Palma playing scared. Coming off Casualties of War, a critical and commercial disappointment, he needed a hit. Hanks was attached before De Palma signed on. Would he have taken this project with Hanks already aboard if Casualties had succeeded? I doubt it. This feels like a director chasing his losses, making compromises he wouldn’t have made with leverage.

The resulting film isn’t Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. It’s Brian De Palma’s—misguided, compromised, toothless where it should bite.