Brian De Palma's over-hyped, over-expensive, would-be blockbuster was one of the more notorious flops of the decade: a fifty million dollar write-off all but ignored by the movie-going public, and for good reason. The novel by Tom Wolfe may have been a blistering social satire highlighting everything wrong with the Reagan 1980s: political corruption, corporate greed, media distortion, self-serving publicity, and so forth. But on the big screen it only served to illustrate everything wrong with modern American movie-making: executive interference, artistic compromise, and the fatal miscasting of bankable stars in inappropriate roles. Asking nice guy Tom Hanks to portray an arrogant, insensitive Wall Street yuppie ruined by a hit-and-run accident in the Bronx was a bad enough decision, but rewriting characters just to accommodate Bruce Willis (a jaded English journalist?) and Morgan Freeman (a fiery Jewish judge?) renders most of Wolfe's intended satire meaningless. The film died a quiet death at the box office, but it at least succeeded as a textbook Hollywood literary adaptation: dumbing down a controversial bestseller to make it more accessible to semi-literate filmgoers.
Review of The Bonfire of the Vanities
