Brian De Palma: The Bonfire of the Vanities

Brian De Palma may be perennially mistreated by a Hollywood that doesn't fully understand where he's coming from, yet I don't know of many directors who have been given so many chances to lose his backers' money. By this stage in his own career, John Carpenter had been all but finished by an industry tiring of his diminishing returns, but De Palma was on just on the cusp of being a validated mainstream filmmaker despite his box office receipts: he'd been given a glamorous gangster picture and a moralizing war film, both of which he infused with his own film-school geekdom even as he demonstrated an ability to play by Hollywood's rules. Having established himself as the '70s film-school leftover best-suited to the decade he'd already mocked with Scarface and Body Double, he finally had his chance to climb to the top.

The Bonfire of the Vanities is the apex of the director's late-'80s rise to prominence within the industry, and damn near the nadir of his career. To be clear, it is not as awful as legend would have you believe, or at least, it isn't to me as I've yet to read Tom Wolfe's source novel. I have actually come across some people who not only defend this film but say they prefer it to the book. If that is true, Wolfe's novel must be a real piece of shit. For even without the knowledge of the book's full contents, De Palma's fiasco feels so incomplete and haphazard it's a wonder the director only realized the problems in retrospect.

If Wolfe's roman à clef was meant to be a detailed account of '80s New York in all its schismatic glory, highlighting the split between the budding Wall Street aristocracy and the terror of crack-ridden streets below the high-rise apartments, De Palma's film paints broad strokes of weak satire. No, that's not right; the film only softens one side of the dichotomy between wealthy, oblivious whites and impoverished minorities. Which side gets it easier in the eyes of majority-baiting Hollywood? Oh, take a wild guess.

Tom Hanks, not yet moved beyond his lighthearted comic image, plays Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street investor who makes millions by the minute and enjoys living the life of luxury. Hanks, only a few years out from his dramatic breakthroughs in Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, occasionally flashes an edge that he could have brought to the fore had the screenplay wanted him to truly delve into the seedier aspects of a Wall Street player. Instead, the film uses Hanks' comic charm, portraying him as out-of-touch but not particularly loathsome in any capacity, despite his general celebration of his garish lifestyle and infidelity with a Southern gold digger named Maria (Melanie Griffith). Even when the two accidentally drive into a crime-ridden area of South Bronx and run over one of two black men who accost them, the film does its best to absolve Sherman while placing any blame for the racist and classist attitudes brought up in the hit-and-run squarely on the shoulders of Maria, caricatured out of human recognition into a whining harpy.

This simplified satire might have worked had the same humanizing effect been given to the other half of the film's overview of New York. Instead, poor Sherman, in the wrong place at the wrong time, runs into the undiluted fury of the poor and minority bloc of the city, their grandiose anger exposing hypocrisies and self-defeating extremism while the privileged enjoy a charmed interpretation of white-collar oblivion. The caricature of Al Sharpton, Reverend Bacon, borders on the racist, with De Palma's low-angle shots of bulging eyes and flaring nostrils nearly framing actor John Hancock in minstrel poses.

Bacon rails against the notion of the unidentified driver of a Mercedes getting away with the cops' indifference, rightly noting that they wouldn't just drop the case if some black driver had run over a middle-class white family. But like Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, Bacon is as much a self-promoter as he is a civic crusader, and he clearly plays up for the cameras to make himself the focal point of the manipulated outrage. But he's successful, and soon he's got Weiss (F. Murray Abraham), the D.A. looking to for a way to win the minority vote after prosecuting minorities overwhelmingly, quaking in his suit. Abraham removed his name from the billing over a contract dispute, but part of me wonders if he did so after reflecting on his performance. If Hancock must make out the leaders of the black community to be nothing more than charlatans looking to crucify a white devil to maintain their stats, Abraham plays Weiss as a flagrant Jewish stereotype, greedily hunting power and also looking for a way to get one up over on the WASPs. When Bacon accuses him of letting the wealthy white go unpunished, Weiss frets over being seen as a "hymie racist pig," then muses aloud how the Italians, Irish and WASPs will love to see him squirm.

Obviously, this is satire, but it's paper-thin, and De Palma inserts nothing to offset the racist view of the city's minorities being wholly self-serving. Instead of flecking human beings with ironies and contradictions, he presents two-dimensional caricatures with comedy that isn't funny enough to absolve the troubling simplicity of their ethnic identities. Pointing out the class blindness that affects the underclass is a perfectly valid criticism, but here the blacks and Latinos come off as nothing more than a mob looking for a white scapegoat. And even when De Palma finally gets down to going after the elites—presenting them as entertained by Sherman's connection to such a pedestrian crime like Roman nobles approvingly watching enslaved gladiators torn to ribbons—he still lets Sherman almost completely off the hook. At the ridiculous trial that closes the film (presided over a black judge instead of the book's Jewish one so as to make Sherman's acquittal seem victorious rather than proof of the system stacked against non-whites), poor, frail Sherman is framed against a screaming, hissing, even singing (hymns, natch) crowd of the poor and pigmentally varied. Whether the De Palma meant it or not, and the swelling, unironic strings that accompany the verdict suggest at least someone did, the audience is meant to root for McCoy to get off Scot-free.

This is all bad enough, but various other additions weigh down the film in subtler ways. The film nearly approaches cleverness when Sherman attends a performance of Don Giovanni and clearly sees himself in the character, a point De Palma then drives him with a sledgehammer, ruining the one good part of the film. Bruce Willis, foisted upon De Palma and a noted pain on-set, plays the alcoholic reporter Peter Fallow, who desperately launches the hit-and-run case to give himself a popular story to justify the paychecks he drinks every day. Whatever role Fallow played in Wolfe's novel, he has no reason to exist here, and De Palma must resort to a framing device that awkwardly inserts him into the movie so Willis can deliver stiff voiceovers in that noncommittal drone of his.

The Bonfire of the Vanities is so clumsy that even the moments of pure De Palma fail to add some life into the film. A swirling overhead shot of Sherman and a coworker is an ingenious touch that makes great use of the striking floor design, but it only goes to show how little time the director spends in Sherman's corporate world. A split-screen between Bacon's self-aggrandizing harangues and a changing right image first showing an amused Fallow looking on then a nervous Weiss watching on TV feels like someone trying to ape De Palma with no regard for composition or juxtaposition. Even the elaborate, wildly entertaining tracking shot that opens the film, following Fallow as he arrives for a speaking engagement through the underground of a complex past admirers and pack reporters, fails to maintain its power when placed in context with the rest of the movie. When the film soon moves completely away from Fallow for an hour, the shot, maybe even Fallow's entire presence in the film, seems a self-serving addition.

After filming completed and The Bonfire of the Vanities went out to a critical and commercial savaging, De Palma finally admitted his error, even letting Julie Salamon come in and write a tell-all on the film's troubled production. I want to read that book as much as Wolfe's source novel: even a basic summary suggests studio tampering, uncooperative stars and wasteful expenditures. But hell, all of that is visible on the screen. It is stunning that a filmmaker as radical (aesthetically and politically) could make a film so firmly reactionary in its ultimate absolution of the luxury class—compare the subverted race roles of the "Be Black, Baby" segment of Hi, Mom! to the clearly demarcated racial cartoons drawn here. Almost as unforgivable, it's one of the director's dullest films. Even the "punchline"-lacking Untouchables (to take a page from Pauline Kael) felt more alive than this.

The only good thing I can say about The Bonfire of the Vanities is that it sports simply one of the greatest shots to ever appear in a De Palma film, a perfectly, almost freakishly timed shot of a Concorde jet landing at sunset as the landing strip aligns perfectly with the descending orb. It is a stunning, arduously planned moment, and it's the best indication of how much better the film might have been had De Palma and his crew been given a better cast and screenplay. From what I can tell, a more accurate representation of Wolfe's novel might have been right up De Palma's alley; he would have delighted in tearing everything apart. Instead, he made by far his most reactionary film, a lighthearted spoof of the upper class and a vicious portrayal of the poor and disenfranchised. Had De Palma not made his mea culpa later, I might have thought he did this on purpose; his other big Hollywood spectacle, The Untouchables, is also conservative. But even the wide berth I give to De Palma's irony has its limits, and if The Bonfire of the Vanities was meant to be as bad as it is, well, mission accomplished.

Brian De Palma: Scarface

That Scarface enjoys a position in the pop culture lexicon that only strengthens with each passing year serves as a validation of its deliberate excesses and its transparently critical view of upper-class decadence in the '80s and the yuppie love for this outrageous lifestyle. Scarface updates Howard Hawks' 1932 original in a way few remakes do: it truly guts the original and places the update firmly within its own time period not only in its references but its aesthetics. In the process, it continues the mounting sociopolitical dissatisfaction creeping its way back into Brian De Palma's work, peeling back the veneer glossed over the whole decade and marking the start of the director's open hostility to the changing social landscape of the 1980s.

What De Palma does best with Scarface is demonstrate that those old gangster films (which his protagonist openly acknowledges as an influence on his young mind) were as much glamorizations of violence and decadence as anything being shunned by contemporaneous critics. Those pre-Code pictures came out during the Great Depression, times of hardship and desolation; yet the films showed well-dressed criminals living the high, fast life. When the film came out in 1983, America was just starting to recover from its worst economy since the depression, and De Palma films inside ritzy clubs and absurdly lavish mansions. And like the mainstream culture looking to flashy pop culture touchstones like Miami Vice for comfort, so too did the masses in the '30s enjoy those gangsters up on the screen (hell, they liked real-life gangsters like Dillinger). Scarface was De Palma's way of showing the public face of the '80s, and it's no wonder so many viewers hated being shown their cultural "values" in such harsh terms.

By making the protagonist of the film not an American crime lord but a Cuban immigrant working his way up through violence and smuggling, De Palma gets to pull back and view his social targets with a clearer view. Montana arrives as seemingly the ideal anti-Communist, a man who viciously decries Castro's takeover and the rise of a society where the individual is told what to do. Yet Tony's entire life is a story of taking and giving orders; if he hates the Communist system, it is because he never gets to be the one telling others what to do. In America, if he pays his dues, he can call the shots someday.

De Palma portrays this irony as a condensation of anti-Communist hypocrisy, the idea that the rule of the rich is acceptable because of lingering belief in the exaggerated American Dream, in which the poor and ignored put up with abuse in the hopes of attaining that one-in-a-million Alger Hiss story that puts them on top. Tony, a ruthless criminal before he gets off the island, comes to Miami with this perverse goal of making it at all costs, and he soon rises to the top by sinking to the bottom of the underworld.

Though not nearly as fine-tuned as Scorsese's later take on similar material with GoodFellas, De Palma updates the operatic web of intrigue propelling the Godfather films from Shakespearean deceit and Machiavellian schemes to the brutal back-and-forth between coke-addled, paranoid psychopaths who can order deaths without batting an eye but turn into quivering blobs of jelly when the tables turn. Well, not all of them do, but is that any better? Is it better to get in one last attack like a caged animal or to try to play on human empathy in one's final moments?

Coming out of that recession, De Palma views wealth and lauded social status with even more distrust than usual, practically equating extreme wealth with crime. When Tony, now a major player in dealer Frank's (Robert Loggia) operation, tracks down his mother and sister, Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), his mother knows instantly that the money Tony can so casually hand over from the pockets of his ostentatious suit came from criminal activity. Even taking her son's past into account, she leaps to the right conclusion so quickly that the film makes its point about Tony's richness being vile long before he explodes at the buttoned-down old money at a restaurant late in the film when he points out that the only difference between them and him is that he doesn't hide his face behind lazy plays at false modesty. Perhaps, however, De Palma is commenting on the setbacks put into place against immigrants and the poor, that the only way to advance out of the slums is through hollow acts like crime (or fame, which ties into the film's second life as a pop-culture icon for the hip-hop community).

According to actor Steven Bauer, during the premiere of Scarface, Martin Scorsese leaned over to him and whispered, “Be prepared, because they’re going to hate it in Hollywood. Because it’s about them.” He was right; already stumbling from the disappointing returns from Blow Out, De Palma suffered a harsh critical blow, though the commercial impact has been largely overstated. Considering that the director nearly found himself shoved into directing Flashdance before he manages to attach himself to this project, one need not reach far to come to the conclusion that De Palma had an axe to grind with some people signing the checks in town. Thinking of Scorsese's interpretation, we can see Tony Montana as a studio head, a coked-out madman caterwauling and passing final judgment on others to maintain his ludicrous sense of power.

Not nearly as savage an attack on the studio system as his following feature, Scarface nevertheless eats at the studios from the inside. Compared to his union of metacinematic satire and tragically Romantic thriller with Blow Out, Scarface plays it straight, straighter than De Palma ever had. He uses mostly crane shots to float around the area, no longer mired with his characters but coolly observing. Apart from the acknowledgment of old gangster movies and the general tenor of Pacino's performance -- outlandish in homage to the flamboyant styles of those classic gangster actors a good decade before Pacino started overacting as his stock-in-trade -- De Palma does not involve his usual trickery as much, his most "directorly" moments still working within the narrative and not examining the extra diegetic space around it.* The commentary is clear, but he hides it in plain sight.

Note the racial makeup of the cast, not just in the leads but -- and this is vital -- the supporting cast. For the big roles, De Palma casts Caucasians, from the Italians Pacino, Loggia and Mastrantonio to the half-white Abraham and Shenar. But he uses actors of Latino descent for the backup characters, like Manny*. If Pacino's entire performance hearkens back to Paul Mini's melodramatic work in Hawks' original or the ever-fiery playing to the rafters that typified Cagney's singular approach, his and the other major castings show an old Hollywood mentality. Could De Palma have gotten major distribution with a recognizable face in the lead, one that audiences could be reassured was really white under than tan and accent?

De Palma's direction shows a mild aesthetic satire not on the level of his experimental features, but he takes his advantage of the dwindling clout he'd barely built up with studios in the previous decades. In fact, I wonder if the film's budget and size is as much attributable to the rising star of its Oscar-winning writer, Oliver Stone, than its director -- as a sidenote, much of Scarface seems a dry run for Stone's own aesthetically and morally provocative social filmmaking stretching from the second half of the decade through the mid-'90s. De Palma has the most fun with a nightclub set he returns to throughout the film, a hall of mirrors constantly reflecting faces and bodies around these paranoid cocaine addicts as their mental breakdowns get visualized behind them. The best of these sequences, featuring an attempting hit on Tony, show off De Palma's mastery of suspense technique, using slow track pans on cranes and zoom-ins to keep narrowing the frame until Richard Belzer's bad jokes are as tense as the electronic music.

"Nothing exceeds like excess," Elvira remarks dryly to her husband's loud rants about her habits, and that's as much a maxim for the film as its ironic use of "The World Is Yours" in flashing lights in the sky and as the grim closing shot. Tony lines his mansion with red carpet, as if he's always showing up to his premiere. It presents a world where, as with the case of the real Scarface, a criminal can kill, smuggle and intimidate all he wants, but he can lose it all if he doesn't give the government its cut in taxes. Furthermore, for all Tony's hideousness, his one act of humanity seals his fate, not his countless acts of evil. This is a film where no one can be trusted, where Cubans fight each other over political allegiances, different Latino nationalities war for supremacy and the underlings plot against their bosses and vice-versa. As with The Godfather, the most sinister acts occur in the boardroom, where horrifying and detached decisions are made for a few dollars more. Man, how couldn't this be about the studios in the '80s?

*The one exception I spotted came when Tony's bored, coke-crazed wife Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer), exasperatedly shouts at her husband, "Can't you stop saying 'fuck' all the time? Can't you stop talking about money? It's boring, Tony." It's not overt enough to be winking, but there's just enough suggestion in Oliver Stone's lines to imply the director and writer understand the absurdity of it all.
**A more in-depth look at the supporting cast and their roots in Latino TV and film can be found in Tony Dayoub's excellent and personal double-post on the film and Carlito's Way.