Unknown to his loyal wife, Sherman is having an affair with Maria Ruskin (Melanie Griffith). His wife Judy (dark-haired Kim Cattrall) is a bit eccentric and posh, but she plays the perfect-mother-and-wife game to their only daughter Campbell (Kirsten Dunst). Sherman McCoy (Tom Hanks) is a financial wünderkid who is about to earn a million dollars through a bonds scheme. Neither should audiences.New York City, 1985. The author wisely had nothing to do with this bonfire of inanities. Willis also narrates the film, reciting some of Wolfe’s choicest prose and giving the illogical and misleading impression that Fallow is based on Wolfe. The movie even invents a meet-cute for Fallow and McCoy involving the subway (McCoy wants to know if it stops at Park Avenue). Casting likable Bruce Willis as Peter Fallow, the sleazy tabloid reporter (British in the book) who writes lies about McCoy to boost his own career, further dulls the story’s edge. So the book’s feisty Judge Kovitsky has been changed from a Jew to a black man, the better to soften cries of racism when the judge – now named White and played by Morgan Freeman – lectures a courtroom largely filled with blacks about decency. Controversy has rarely played big at the box office. With its uncanny intimations of How-ard Beach and Bensonhurst, Tawana Brawley and Al Sharpton, Milken and Ivan Boesky, Wolfe’s novel was a powder keg that De Palma’s movie version cowardly defuses. The movie Maria is a cupcake who spouts malapropisms (“I read spasmodically”) and arouses the limp McCoy with such come-ons as “I’m a sucker for a soft dick, Shuh-mun.” Michael Cristofer’s script substitutes crudity for Wolfe’s sophistication – a disservice Cristofer previously performed for John Updike on The Witches of Eastwick. Melanie Griffith has the curves and the Southern-belle voice of McCoy’s mistress, Maria Ruskin, but the script robs this magnolia of her steel. In the book, McCoy is imperious, a shallow user Hanks plays him as goofy and sympathetic. But he is not Sherman McCoy, the patrician bond trader whose career mirrors the rise and fall of such Wall Street “masters of the universe” as Michael Milken. Tom Hanks is a comic actor of proven gifts. On film, Bonfire achieves a consistency of ineptitude rare even in this era of over-inflated cinematic air bags. Director Brian De Palma’s $45 million film version of the book is superficial, shopworn and cartoonish.

Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel about the Greed Decade was penetrating, prophetic and incisively satirical.

Bonfire for the vanities