At a minimum, a biographical documentary should illuminate its subject. It is a success, however modest, when the viewer walks away with new understanding or appreciation. Radical Wolfe, the documentary about the writer and novelist Tom Wolfe, is an utter failure on those terms. There is nothing in it that you could not find in the first round of Wolfe obituaries. In fact, those obituaries probably were richer texts than this film, since they were written with panache and affection for Wolfe, who invented “New Journalism” from nothing before becoming a literary sensation. Director Richard Dewey is traditional to a fault, cobbling together archival footage and a dubious collection of talking heads. In fact, one of the people interviewed for this film is borderline shocking, an implied insult to the audience that suggests Dewey hardly understands Wolfe’s legacy.
If you are unfamiliar with Wolfe, at least Dewey gives some idea of his influence. Starting in the 1960s, Tom Wolfe dazzled readers with books and magazine articles that were both literary and factual. That is what “New Journalism” means: Wolfe believed the journalist could take every flourish and rhetorical technique available to him, not unlike a fiction writer, in order to tell a story. Onomatopoeia and bizarre punctuation are the more famous items in his toolkit, although breaking the rules of journalistic syntax is not the only reason he at one point was the most famous writer in America. Books like Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff captured the public imagination, and more importantly, Wolfe developed a persona – a dainty southern aristocrat in New York – through his constant self-promotion and his ubiquitous white suits.
Dewey handles all this material with the artistry you might find in a lengthy news segment. There are many, many clips of Wolfe talking to the likes of Tom Brokaw, Johnny Carson, and Dick Cavett. Clips of The Right Stuff and Bonfire of the Vanities pepper the film, while his friends and former colleagues halfheartedly embellish the material with their own observations. What is striking – often to the film’s detriment – is how little insight the friends and colleagues actually provide. There is the sense he was an extremely private man, one who was motivated by spite because his Richmond upbringing clashed with the left-leaning New England intelligentsia that defined New York in the mid-twentieth century. The film rarely gets any deeper than that, a kind of deferential respect that Wolfe spent his career avoiding.
Not only are there few anecdotes, but the archival footage only allows for the occasional Wolfe zinger, not a suggestion of a major intellect. The author Michael Lewis at least has the wherewithal to put Wolfe in the context of other writers – discussing his friendship with Hunter S. Thompson, for example, or how novelists like John Irving/Updike came to hate him – and yet even then the most incisive things we have about Wolfe the man, not the writer, was that he was polite and private. If a film cannot muster more than that, then perhaps it is best to scrap the project altogether.
The best section of the film is about “Radical Chic,” the 1970 article where Wolfe crashes a fundraiser for The Black Panthers at the home of the famed conductor Leonard Bernstein. Wolfe deliciously withering, mocking the clash of liberal ideals and vulgar displays of cosmopolitan society, and Dewey’s sole smart decision – hiring Jon Hamm to read snippets of Wolfe’s prose – drives home how Wolfe could be caustic and elegant within the same sentence. More than anything else, this essay articulates Wolfe’s worldview and his contrary ideas of American exceptionalism, although it is unintentionally revealing that Wolfe’s own words, and not any original material for the film, is the best articulation of this point. Wolfe was a towering figure, one whose books were major cultural events, and a film about such a figure should attempt to at least match his stature. Instead, Radical Wolfe will make you wish Jon Hamm would record an audiobook of Wolfe’s best works, since his performance alone suggests he is up to the task.
While Hamm’s presence certainly drums up goodwill for the film, one of the interviewees squanders it all and then some. Dewey interviews Peter Thiel, the vindictive venture capitalist who is too dull to be an evil genius, for this film. Thiel’s inclusion is more than a mistake, it’s a blunder, and not just because Thiel – in classic tech bro fashion – is incapable of articulating an interesting thought. His past conduct is an attempt to undermine Wolfe’s legacy. Wolfe liked to argue that freedom of expression is an American value worth fighting for, while Thiel would bankroll lawsuits in order to obliterate media outlets out of existence. Wolfe was a proud American, albeit an idiosyncratic one, while Thiel is anti-American right down to his rotten core. If Wolfe ever crashed and reported on one of Thiel’s parties as he did with Bernstein, then Thiel – the thin-skinned worm he is – would still be working to tarnish Wolfe’s reputation.
We are then left with two options. Either Dewey is aware of Thiel’s past and included him in his film, anyway, of the incongruity never occurred to him. It is unclear which is worse, although it is ultimately immaterial. In terms of form and content, Radical Wolfe fails its subject and does something much worse – especially given Wolfe’s legacy. It is relentlessly, tiresomely mediocre.
Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber
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