A narrative on white liberal guilt, distinct from Tom Wolfe

Is Tom Wolfe, the pioneering journalist and popular novelist who died six years ago this month, still getting the attention he deserves? In recent months, the signs have been mixed. Last fall saw the release of a decent documentary about him, but it received only mild praise and wasn’t long for the box office. This past March, the Atlantic released a list of more than 130 great American novels published over the past century, and none of the Man in White’s bestsellers made the cut. That same day, the New York Times listed 22 of the funniest novels published since 1961 — Wolfe-less again.

At least Netflix remembers Tom Wolfe, right? This month, the streaming service released a six-episode series based on Wolfe’s 1998 novel A Man in Full. It’s the first on-screen adaptation of Wolfe since Brian De Palma’s disastrous Bonfire of the Vanities film in 1990. And it will make you wish they’d waited a bit longer.

The cast, if not exactly star-studded, has its share of luminaries, including Jeff Daniels, Diane Lane, and Lucy Liu. Its behind-the-camera talent is also impressive. It was written by David E. Kelley (best known for his string of legal comedies in the late 1990s and early 2000s, including Ally McBeal and Boston Legal), and three of the six episodes were directed by Emmy-award-winning actress Regina King, who also received a Golden Globe nomination for her directorial work in One Night in Miami…

Yet despite all this talent, the miniseries is a mediocre comedy-drama that fails to convey the energy, wonder, or humor of the source material.

The series begins at the 60th birthday party for real estate mogul Charlie Croker, played by Daniels, sporting a bad dye job, a southern accent, and a bum knee from his character’s college football days. The opulent party would make you think Croker is on top of the world. Shania Twain, the rhinestone cowgirl herself, sings to him!!! She was a big deal when the novel was published!!! But we soon learn that he’s deeply in debt to the merciless suits at PlannersBanc. During a tense meeting at the bank, as Croker sweats through his shirt to reveal “saddlebags” under his arms, he realizes that the bankers — especially the one with whom he worked closest, Raymond Peepgass (Tom Pelphrey) — are set on destroying him. Plus, he’s got a bad knee.

The Croker/Peepgass relationship is a twisted one, with the banker both admiring and resenting the older man, wanting to take what was his for himself. That includes Croker’s ex-wife, played by Lane. Indeed, the battle between Croker and the bankers boils down to masculinity and virility, made clear by their frequent references to their physical prowess.

Contrasting Croker’s lavish life, as precarious as it is, the series turns to a worker in one of Croker’s many enterprises, an expectant father named Conrad Hensley. Conrad, a white Californian in the novel, is a black Atlantan here and married to Charlie’s secretary. His assault by a white officer during an argument over a parking violation adds a dramatic racial dynamic to the series.

Needing an attorney in a pinch, Conrad is represented at his arraignment by Conrad’s in-house counsel. A running joke in the novel is that this character is named Roger White II, but because he admires Booker T. Washington (among other offenses against true black identity), he’s called Roger Too White. Unlike the author of Radical Chic, this series has no interest in poking fun at progressive racial assumptions, so that joke is discarded and the lawyer is simply Roger White (Aml Ameen). Dissatisfied with his lucrative but soulless work for Croker, White finds purpose in representing Conrad.

Meanwhile, White’s old classmate Wes Jordan (William Jackson Harper) is running for reelection as mayor and needs help deep-sixing his opponent, who happens to be a former teammate of Charlie’s. The mayor offers Charlie a deal: He’ll make the bank back off if Charlie will publicly accuse his opponent of raping a woman in college. To do that, though, Charlie would have to violate the privacy of his ex-wife’s best friend (played by Ally McBeal alum Liu), who isn’t so sure she was assaulted or that she wants her story told.

This plotline features another noteworthy deviation from the novel. In Wolfe’s story, a star black current running back is accused of raping the daughter of one of Charlie’s rich, white friends. The series again avoids the discomfiting racial implications of Wolfe’s choices. Still, despite that tweak, this is probably the best subplot in the series because it maintains the moral complexities of the source.

But the series seems most interested in Conrad’s plotline, with which it takes regrettable liberties. In the novel, Conrad stumbles across a book of stoic philosophy that changes his life and, through his evangelization, the life of Charlie Croker. But Kelley simply has Conrad’s wife explain, “The thing about my husband is that he’s into Stoicism. His brain defaults to the positive.” Norman Vincent Peale, the noted Stoic? We briefly hear Conrad reciting lines from Seneca in his head before ~poof~ the ancient philosophy leaves as quickly as it had entered. A central premise in the novel becomes a half-baked idea on the screen.

Instead, Kelley devotes his attention to White’s surprising abilities as a defense attorney, and his battle for Conrad’s freedom culminates in the longest scene of the series, a nearly 10-minute courtroom drama featuring a misquotation of Oliver Wendell Holmes and legal theories as absurd as any you’d encounter on The Practice.

Given Kelley’s risk-taking on the often visually innovative Ally McBeal, it’s surprising that he and the directors did not try to mimic Wolfe’s unorthodox and onomatopoeic prose. Say what you will about De Palma’s adaptation of Bonfire, it does feature a number of interesting shots and angles that convey Wolfe’s sense of wonder. There’s little of that liveliness in this series, the most significant exception being a shocking moment of Viagra-enhanced — SCHWIIIIING — full-frontal nudity in the final episode. You’ve been warned.

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The adaptation does stay true to the novel by having an unsatisfying ending, but even here, it is entirely unmoored from anything that happened in the book. Indeed, as dissatisfying as the novel’s final act was, it was a matter of how Charlie’s fate was depicted, not that fate itself. Wolfe’s Charlie becomes a better man thanks to Conrad’s Stoic influence. Kelley’s Charlie has no interaction with Conrad and undergoes no significant change, attempting to establish his physical and financial superiority to the dark and bitter end.

De Palma once explained that in the Bonfire movie, he made “the classic mistake, which is to change the text that I loved so much. And I changed it to the point that nobody liked it.” With A Man in Full, Netflix has done the same.

Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and co-editor of Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived (Crown, 2017).