bonfire of the vanities

I like Bruce Willis when he's about to retch and he's wearing a white tux and he's hoisting a bottle of scotch above his head, or, in another moment, when he traps a young princess in a service elevator and faceplants her with a fistful of baked salmon. "That's salmon," she says. "That's for eating!" All of this comes to you in one cut, a la The Player in the Tom Wolfe adaptation Bonfire of the Vanities. The film swings in much the same arc as the fish in Willis' fist: it is luxury, raped by extravagance; it is nature, overtaken by greed; it is pink, squirming wealth—and it is deliciously awful.

Willis plays the Wolfe stand-in: a partying reporter who's feted by society when his nonfiction book gleans scores of meaningless prizes. The subject of this tour de force is Sherman McCoy (Tom Hanks), a wealthy sheep in a herd of wealthy men, who lives his life by the rules until an affair with the "awfully delicious" Maria (Melanie Griffiths) leads him to commit a hit and run in the south bronx. Slander by the press, a racial boil up, and a lying mistress lead McCoy to trial by jury. There to see the whole thing through is Willis, whose plotline of a measly reporter hunting for scraps arcs him to an accomplished genius, toasted by Kempners. Weaving this thread through Hanks' lovable rich boy McCoy is not an easy task: the film falls into grueling narration that socks the wind out of 80s driving instruction videotapes with lines like "McCoy didn't know what was coming to him." Please.

Still, I enjoyed the film as a "New Yorker" recognizing sites as much as I enjoyed the film as a "reporter" scrounging around for scraps. It's the kind of thing like Arthur that makes you long for a private jet, even though the whole "message/moral" thing is that you're not supposed to care.