The reason why Tom Wolfe’s lush, complex, corrosive and uncomfortable work has not been successfully adapted until now – not even Brian De Palma could handle it – has to do precisely with its condition as a perverse counter-game, so excessively 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 is impossibly slippery. And at the same time, thorny. After all, the great themes are there, treated with a depth and brutal honesty. There is the United States and its crude and ruthless contradictions, and there are, always and again, the monsters that it has created and creates, above all, money, the power of the white man that capitalism makes believe is invincible.
The epitome of all that is All a manthe 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), directed by Regina King and Thomas Schlamme, and you’d say the most notable success is in the cast. It’s, above all, Jeff Daniels as Charlie Croker, the real estate magnate who owes more than a billion dollars to banks—800 million of them to his nemesis in the story, PlannersBanc, the place where one Raymond Peepgrass, the classic “little man” of Russian literature, a coward here completely unleashed, works—and who refuses to believe that his life could be dismantled by something like that. Because he’s never lost. How can he be on the verge of losing everything? He simply can’t.
Daniels, with his tone and accent—a ridiculous, ostentatiously redneck Southerner—with his body—it’s not just that he’s big, he’s a brute, and his body language is a good part of the character—and his gestures—his looks and even his grimaces—accentuates the corrupt power of the character, and even molds him, so that he gradually goes from holding a throne from which it seems impossible to see him fall, to not being domesticated, but rather understanding how he can, in this new world, survive. Because he says it himself, and clearly: “The world is going to make men like me 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 said—and that is that, the reality of 1998 has been imposed by the present, and what remains of the original story are just veins.
Yes, there’s Croker being “all man,” that is, a classic heterosexual white American male—with a desire to be a trophy wife, even though he doesn’t end up being exactly that—with an unfathomable power, someone admirable only to other men who aren’t there yet, but who would like to be—like this Peepgrass, played, brilliantly though somewhat clichéd, by Tom Pelphrey—and the way he falls is the way he did in 1998, except his way of stopping the blow is very different. Kelley decides to turn Me Too on its head and use it so that those men, that sort of predators not only of women but of everyone else, devour each other, or try to do so, because the honesty that Croker is addressing—or seeking—must go through a sacrifice that has to do with pointing out an old partner.
And it seems that the way he survives such a ruse – or the way he executes it – says a lot about the survival of a masculinity that imposes itself on a peak that is anything but real. A peak that happens, 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 both for forcing your guests to witness a violent copulation between horses because it fascinates you, and for saving your secretary’s husband, who has ended up in jail unjustly, even if 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 trying to do here is to narrate 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 point in the story, 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 tear themselves apart, and who do it because they have to in order to feel that they have not stopped being themselves – have him surrounded. The sharks are the bankers, who represent a type of passive, but equally aggressive, masculinity. There are, one might say, gradations of aggressiveness, which reach their highest point in the prison where one of the characters, Conrad (Jon Michael Hill) – a black man, of good position – ends up.
Conrad introduces racism and class somewhat abruptly, but he does so clumsily: his is a kind of overgrown subplot that tries to overshadow the main story, in an attempt to both pay tribute to Wolfe himself—who wisely stressed the racism inherent to America, and specifically, to the American man, in his stories, of there being a weaker sex, clearly the only possible one—and to be fair, without making it clear at all times that Conrad’s own survival depends entirely on Croker, which does a disservice to the story, and to that very 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 sketch something like a partial dissection of the male ego, and its sad condemnation.
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