A Man In Full review: David E. Kelley tackles Tom Wolfe
Netflix’s small-screen adaptation, starring Jeff Daniels, lacks the novel's sardonic bite
TV Reviews A Man in Full
Gonzo journalist-turned-literary titan Tom Wolfe’s second novel, 1998's A Man In Full, is similar to his barnburner of a debut, 1987's The Bonfire Of The Vanities. They’re both sprawling social satires about the powerful and the not-so-powerful and the cities they inhabit, namely Atlanta and New York City, respectively.
The Bonfire Of The Vanities was a bestseller adapted by director Brian DePalma into a box office flop in 1990 starring a miscast Tom Hanks as a swaggering Wall Street “Master of the Universe.” And now, 25 years after A Man In Full was a National Book Award finalist, it is a six-episode limited series (out May 2) starring a miscast Jeff Daniels as Charlie Croker, a former Georgia Tech football hero and real estate “Master of the Universe” mired in debt and forced to defend his empire from bankers with grudges.
Netflix’s A Man In Full lacks Wolf’s sardonic bite, insider knowledge of privilege, and an outsider’s disdain for American institutions and the egomaniacs who lead them. His class and racial critiques are juicy stuff (if sometimes superficial), and his source material mocks the petty dramas of the upper crust and America’s fraught, unfair justice system. Unfortunately, this series lacks hot sauce, which isn’t to suggest it isn’t occasionally enjoyable. It’s perfectly watchable—and that’s too bad.
The assembled talent behind A Man In Full is impressive, beginning with the show’s creator and writer, David E. Kelley, a name synonymous with blockbuster primetime dramas like Ally McBeal and Boston Legal. Three episodes are directed by veteran TV impresario Thomas Schlamme, most known for his many collaborations with Aaron Sorkin, including The West Wing and Sports Night. The other three are directed by Emmy and Oscar-winning actor Regina King. So yes, this is a dream team.
And yet, A Man In Full feels half-baked. All the elements are there. It’s well-shot, acted, and directed. No expense was spared. But it lacks punch. Spice. To use a word Croker loves: vigor. A Man In Full isn’t as experimental as some of Netflix’s buzzier, more recent shows, like Ripley and Baby Reindeer. Which is fine. Not everything has to push boundaries. This limited series aspires to be ready for 8 PM EST on CBS, an adult melodrama that is easy on the eyes and brain, and if your eyes and brain drift to your phone for a minute, you’ll probably miss nothing because nothing truly climactic happens until the finale. Perhaps Netflix and other streamers are to blame, as they demand unobtrusive, bland entertainment that flows from one hour to the next for all eternity.
The book was a Clinton-era look at racial politics, sex, and money in the economically booming New South. Instead of leaning into the late ’90s, a time of seeming peace and prosperity that still intrigues modern audiences, Kelley and his colleagues spend time sanding off sharp edges and forcing the original’s pre-9/11 vibes into the more complicated reality of 2024 with mixed success. The world that Wolfe’s Croker inhabits is much different than today. And the result is a production that feels out of time.
The most compelling scene in the first episode is a boardroom confrontation between Daniels’ Croker and the banker threatening his debt-riddled corporation, a pugnacious suit played exquisitely by Bill Camp. This macho back-and-forth is watched, with delight, by the show’s main villain, the aptly named Raymond Peepgrass, a nerd with a vendetta against Croker. Tom Pelphrey’s Peepgrass is a tortured, ambitious weasel who wants to take a big man down. Variations of this same boardroom scene are repeated throughout the series, and it’s understandable why: They’re the most exciting, and A Man In Full is six long hours, some of them devoid of original conflicts or satisfying resolutions. It needs all the drama it can summon.
Wolfe’s fiction and non-fiction writings explore American masculinity, whether it’s a riveting record of the taciturn tough guys of NASA in The Right Stuff or wealthy hedonist Sherman McCoy in The Bonfire Of The Vanities. As such, Wolfe isn’t famous for writing three-dimensional women, and Kelley’s A Man In Full tries to save the late author from himself.
First, Kelley & Co. cast amazing actors, including Sarah Jones as an underestimated trophy wife who is smarter than she seems and the great Diane Lane as Croker’s ex-wife. (Lane shines in whatever roles she takes, even small thankless ones. She was a standout in this year’s FX series Feud: Capote Vs. The Swans.) And it’s always a pleasure to see Lucy Liu in anything, really. But these actors are given supporting parts, mostly wives and friends of wives.
What is there to say about the show’s star, Jeff Daniels? He’s one of the best to do it, a worthy member of America’s pantheon of Hollywood greats. He’s versatile as a character actor or a lead. Daniels has this rare ability to be loveable and vile, interchangeably and simultaneously. He possesses a relaxed but combustible intelligence and a Midwestern sturdiness that makes him perfect when cast as an everyman or a grounded authority figure, but he isn’t well suited as a debauched Dixie capitalist.
The last time Daniels led an hourlong drama was as a brilliant, frustrating cable news host in Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, a cringe-inducing, overly romantic look at broadcast journalism. (That show did not involve Thomas Schlamme as a producer.) Daniels tackled The Newsroom with gusto and tries to do the same here, but only with a thick Southern drawl. He is also saddled with corny Big Daddy-isms that he dutifully spouts. The actor is a consummate professional, after all. But unfortunately, this just isn’t the project for him.
A Man In Full premieres May 2 on Netflix
32 Comments
I highly recommend The Devil’s Candy, about the making of Bonfire. An endlessly fascinating look at a film production ballooning out of everyone’s control thanks to a multitude of unchecked egos (the film opens with what’s still the most expensive single shot in film history, in which the Concorde had to land at a very specific time in the sunrise).With the current kick Hollywood is on to give second chances on TV to great books with lousy film adaptations, I’ve been hoping for a while that Bonfire of the Vanities would be one of them, and this seemed like a perfect opportunity to drum up interest in it. So if it really is this unremarkable, that’s a huge shame.
Agreed on “The Devils’s Candy,” great book about a terrible movie. A Man in Full was a strange book – probably should have been two or three different books rather than the monstrosity it was. Bonfire was much, much better.
If you like that sort of thing, also read Michael Seller’s John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood (about the making of the flop John Carter movie) and Glen Berger’s The Song of Spiderman (about the fiasco that was Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark).
I’ve seen a lot of movies, which means I’ve seen a lot of bad movies. They were all bad for their own reasons. But no movie has made me as ANGRY, enraged at the squandered opportunity, as Bonfire of the Vanities. Like if Vanilla Ice secured the exclusive rights to a previously undiscovered Mozart symphony and translated it into an Ice-Ice-Baby remix for his big comeback.
Devil’s Candy was mostly fun for dispelling the assumption that studios are run by adults who know what they’re doing. Just a complete mess from start to finish.
I think it’s also fascinating to see how even bad movies are seldom made with awareness that they’re bad. But always done with everyone involved fighting hard to do the best. Even if sometimes the final results are disastrous.
It’s been a few years since I read it but IIRC a big part of the problem was de Palma got hung up on a handful of hugely expensive setpieces / shots that ate up disproportionate amounts of the budget. Well, that and casting Tom Hanks as a puddle-deep egomaniac.
I don’t think that’s the case the book makes at all. The only shot they heavily go into was the Concorde shot, and that was by the lead 2nd unit, with the book showing that to be a monumental accomplishment. The Tom Hanks casting is frequently discussed to be an ill fit (with even Hanks feeling he isn’t right) but that decision is shown explicitly to completely predate DePalma’s involvement. A lot of the thesis of the book is that nobody did anything particularly wrong, and everyone was fighting hard, it just ended up being a lousy movie. A key example there being Bruce Willis being passionately determined to play a role radically against type, but reverting back to his standard type regardless due to his limitations. The most notable thing with the book that I love is that Salmon had complete and total access, from start to end, and even though the studio was deeply uncomfortable with this, Depalma personally cleared her and fought for her to retain complete journalistic access, regardless of how the movie turned out. Later editions even have a decades later afterword where Salmon and Depalma are shown to have maintained a friendship, with Depalma happy he had her write the book, even though the film was ultimately a disaster.
One of the biggest causes that the book puts forward as dooming the project was the extremely rushed schedule to wildly shoot the film and edit it for a prime Christmas release, all done in less than a year. But even there, Salmon never points specific blame at anybody, merely highlighting that this was the result of people believing they could accomplish something spectacular, and tragically falling short. The book never posits that the budget went over, or that DePalma was irresponsible with managing the budget. Quite the contrary, DePalma is depicted fighting tooth and nail to keep the budget under control, while still trying to give a very talkly movie some visual flair.
Devil’s candy was a masterpiece. A favourite book of mine. Really drills into how even a bad movie has so much effort and passion poured into it.
We really need more satire at this time, and not the type of unsubtle horseshit that Adam McKay puts out. But there seems to have been many productions recently that take a lot of great works of satire and adapt them into being straight-forward dramas, completely missing the point of the original. I’m thinking about Dredd, the Judge Dredd adaptation from 2012, and George Clooney’s Catch 22 from a few years ago. Are creators worried about satire? Are they worried about digging into these works and exploring what they are saying about society, and getting concerned that audiences won’t like it?
I’d say Dredd has satirical elements but it’s kinda low key (and the comic itself would frequently veer back and forth between dark comedy like “Requiem For A Heavyweight” and action-heavy stuff like the Judge Death things.)
With you on Clooney’s adaptation. The novel seemed to have a lot more humor.
As a native Atlantan I’ve been wondering when someone would adapt this. It’s eminently filmable. But Croker should be played by someone like the late Fred Thompson. A big part of his persona is he’s a former Tech football player who has let his physique go to seed but still uses his frame to intimidate people. Lane is wonderful I’m sure but the point of the ex is that she’s a woman in her mid-50s who also has lost some of her natural figure and beauty, which is why the second wife was able to steal him away. Again, this is embedded in the relationships between the characters. Even the trophy wife isn’t a woman who walks around with her fake boobs popping out of her shirt like in that photo. She’s smart with a degree in art history and works for a wealth management firm as an art consultant to their clients. I’m also in finance so the parts involving the banks are a blast. Here again Pelphrey is way too young for his role. That guy is a career credit officer at a bank who is frustrated and embarrassed by his own timidity. The book does nail southern racial politics, though. Hopefully the show doesn’t shy from that.
I loved the book (as I did Bonfire of the Vanities) so will give this a look. My one hope is that it addresses my one issue with both books – the endings are very weak.
I’m sure I’ll watch it as well but am not surprised to hear there’s no big dramatic ending, since you’re right the book just kind of stops instead of concluding. Wolfe’s talent for picking out the small details along the way is what made the book such a great read.ETA: Fun fact, that photo was taken from a top floor in a building I spent the first four years of my professional life working in (SunTrust Plaza, I’m sure now called Truist – the dumbest name anyone could have come up with). Building on the right, Bank of America tower over Daniel’s shoulder on the left.
You need someone who’s Southern, intimidating, but gone to seed, and Fred Thompson’s dead?Well, maybe 20 years ago.
1998’s A Man In Full, is similar to his barnburner of a debut, 1987’s The Bonfire Of The Vanities
Bonfire is the superior work, by far. I would like to see that book adapted into a limited series since the film didn’t have the room, or creative talent all around, do it justice.
There’s a fun and interesting piece to be written about adaptations that seem to come way too late to benefit from good will around the original work. The Gerard Butler Phantom of the Opera comes to mind as the most obvious recent example, but Man in Full is pretty striking. I read that book and enjoyed it, but gosh, an adaptation of it in 2024? The book’s been out of the public eye for decades at this point. Why now?
For that matter, it felt passe not long after it was published. It was a hit, sure, but within six months you could find STACKS for 30% off at Borders. They thought it would be the second coming of Bonfire but it was only like the one and a half coming.
For a novel that thick it was also very specific, in terms of time and place. At 750 pages that’s a pretty big ask for someone who doesn’t have a specific interest. Also, the ending was full-on weird.
I mean Phantom had a following around it for a long time, even post Crawford, so that was a fair bet. But yeah this book had a big initial push but didn’t stay long in the memory.
See (or rather don’t) the terrible adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in 1998. That was absolutely the wrong time to adapt that book. You could argue that today might make some sense, as Thompson’s early 1970s disgust with America has echos today, but what made people think the 1990s was the right time for that?
Because that was the time they were finally able to do it?
I’m pretty sure Terry Gilliam had been trying for years.
That movie rules tho
Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a great adaptation.
how is jeff daniels miscast in anything?
In this case, Croker is a former middle linebacker who has gotten fat but still bullies everyone and uses his size to support his bluster. Daniels just isn’t naturally intimidating in the way the character is written in the novel.
So perhaps Bill Camp himself should have got the lead role!
Why in the world would you make this in 2024? Tom Wolfe’s “satire” was boomerific “old man yells at cloud” nonsense even when he was alive.
I guess Doctor Rammer Doc Doc was satire too razor-sharp for Netflix to dare including
“Wolfe isn’t famous for writing three-dimensional women.”If you’ve read Wolfe’s leering, woefully out of touch novel “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” you will understand how true that is. Hopefully that one isn’t adapted, but I’m sure it will be some day.
As mentioned earlier I love both Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full, but I resisted buying I Am Charlotte Simmons because I couldn’t imagine that he’d do a good job of the subject matter.