The reason why the work, lush, complex, pure corrosive and uncomfortable nuance, by Tom Wolfe has not been successfully adapted until now—not even Brian De Palma could handle it—has to do, precisely, with its perverse condition. counterplay, so extremely intelligent and malevolent—the writer used to say that he was always on the side of “the opposition,” and he was at all times, almost in every line of whatever he was writing—that it turns out Impossibly elusive. And at the same time, thorny. After all, the big themes are there, treated with depth and brutal honesty. There is the United States and its crude and merciless contradictions, and there are, always and again and again, the monsters that it has created and creates, above all, money, the power of the white man that capitalism makes us believe invincible.
Epitome of all that is All a man, the novel that Wolfe published in 1998, and whose adaptation has just been released (Netflix). The script is written by a television genius like David E. Kelley (Big Little Lies, Ally McBeal), and it is directed by Regina King and Thomas Schlamme, and it would be said that the main and most notable success is in the cast. It’s, above all, in Jeff Daniels as Charlie Croker, the real estate magnate who owes more than $1 billion to banks—800 of them to his nemesis in the story, PlannersBanc, the place where one Raymond Peepgrass, the classic “little man” of Russian literature, a pusillanimous here completely unleashed—and who refuses to believe that his life could be dismantled by something like that. Because he has never lost. How can he be on the verge of losing everything? He just he can’t.
Daniels, with his tone and his accent—a ridiculous, ostentatiously redneck Southern—with his body—it’s not just that he’s big, it’s that he’s brutish, and his body language is a good part of the character—and his gesture—the looks and even the grimaces—accentuates the corrupt power of the character, and even shapes him, so that he gradually goes from holding a throne from which it seems impossible to see him fall, to not being domesticated, but understanding how he can, in that new world, survive. Because he says it himself, and clearly: “The world is going to make men like me become extinct.” And here is the other success of the adaptation—fascinating, but irregular, in some sense, small, or not at the level of what Wolfe explained—and that is that, on the reality of 1998, the present has been imposed, and what remains of the original story are just veins.
Yes, there is Croker being “a complete man”, that is, being a classic heterosexual white American male – with the intention of being a trophy woman, although he does not end up being exactly that –, with unfathomable power, someone admirable only to other men. who aren’t there yet, but who would like to be—like that Peepgrass guy, played, brilliantly if somewhat clichédly, by Tom Pelphrey—and the way he falls is the way he did in 1998, only the way he stops the blow is very different. Kelley decides to turn Me Too on its head and use it so that those men, those kinds of predators of not only women but everyone else, devour each other, or try to do so, because the honesty at which it is aimed – or that it seeks — Croker must go through a sacrifice that has to do with pointing out an old companion.
And it would seem that the way in which he survives such a ruse—or the way in which he executes it—says a lot about the survival of a masculinity that self-imposes a peak that has nothing real about it. A peak that passes, as the character repeats over and over again, by being yourself in such a pure state. That is, doing whatever you want at every moment, and this goes for both forcing your guests to witness a violent copulation between horses because you are fascinated by it, and for saving your secretary’s husband, who has ended up in the house. jail unjustly, even if to do so you have to spend a million dollars to add to your debt of more than a thousand. Empathy is, at all times, unnecessary and accessory; if it exists, it is often little more than a mirage that reflects a humanity that, in reality, you lack.
But what we are talking about here is narrating the end of one of those men. “Every man has his end but that is not the tragedy. The tragedy is that he refuses to acknowledge it,” says Croker, at a certain moment in history, when the sharks—other men; forget that women exist, this is about guys who are not always rich but always powerful, in some sense, who skin themselves, and who do it because they have to do it to feel that they have not stopped being themselves—they have him surrounded. The sharks are the bankers, who represent a type of passive, but equally aggressive, masculinity. There are, one would say, gradations of aggressiveness, which in the prison where one of the characters ends up, Conrad (Jon Michael Hill)—a black man, of good standing—reaches his highest point.
Conrad introduces, somewhat abruptly, racism, and class, but he does so clumsily: his is a kind of subplot that grows excessively, and tries to overshadow the main story, in an attempt to, at the same time , pay tribute to Wolfe himself – who wisely influenced the racism inherent to the American, and specifically, the American man, in his stories, of there being a weaker sex, clearly, the only one possible -, and to be fair, without giving away It is clear at all times that Conrad’s own survival depends entirely on Croker, which does a disservice to the story, and that same sense of justice. And yet, the miniseries—in which, by the way, Diane Lane shines, and how, in the role of Croker’s ex-wife, and Peepgrass’s lover—manages to outline something resembling a partial dissection of the male ego, and its sad condemnation. .
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