Tom Wolfe A complete man It’s a huge book, in more ways than one. A 742-page social novel featuring an iconoclastic real estate mogul in downtown Atlanta, Wolfe took more than a decade to research and write. When it was published in 1998, Farrar, Straus & Giroux commissioned a jaw-dropping initial print run from 1.2 million copies in hardcover; two years later he sold 1.4 million. The book’s themes – money, power, race, masculinity – are equally grand.
So it’s more than a little strange that the first word that comes to mind to describe Netflix’s new adaptation of A complete manpremiering on May 2nd, it is little. The talent involved is no less. The excessively prolific Big little lies creator David E. Kelley serves as writer and showrunner for the miniseries; Regina King, who made an impressive feature film directorial debut with One night in Miami, commands half of the season; and the cast includes Jeff Daniels, Diane Lane, Lucy Liu and William Jackson Harper. However, the meager six episodes this team delivers feel perfunctory, disjointed, and ultimately pointless. Tasked with updating a 26-year-old novel that has aged poorly, Kelley reduces context and character development so much that what’s left never turns into a cohesive story.
The series unfolds during the last 10 days of the life of local hero Charlie Croker (Daniels). This is not a spoiler. The premiere begins with an aerial shot of the real estate titan sprawled dead on a rug. In voiceover, Charlie explains, in his Foghorn Leghorn-meets-Boomhauer of King of the hill drawls, who wanted to leave his mark on the world: “At the end of the day, a man has to shake his balls.” After celebrating his 60th birthday with a glitzy party where Shania Twain serenades him, he finds his flamboyant ways challenged in an ambush meeting with a bank to which he owes $800 million. They want their money back and will ruin you if they don’t get it. For banker Raymond Peepgrass (Tom Pelphrey, terrified by Jeffrey Dahmer’s glasses), this fight is personal; Charlie treats him like a nobody, so pathetic cartoon Raymond became obsessed with taking him down.
There are some poorly incorporated subplots. Charlie’s conflicted in-house lawyer, Roger White (Aml Ameen), is drawn into his Morehouse classmate, Atlanta Mayor Wes Jordan’s (Harper) scheme to smear a right-wing opponent. A black man named Conrad Hensley (Jon Michael Hill), the husband of Charlie’s assistant (Chanté Adams), is arrested in a racially coded incident, and Roger is also placed on the case. Charlie’s ex-wife Martha (Lane) and her friend Joyce (Liu), a skin-care entrepreneur, lurk behind the scenes, until they are finally drawn into unlikely stories involving Raymond and sexual assault, respectively.
Wrong decisions permeate every frame of this adaptation. There’s rampant exaggeration, nonsensical backstories, sex scenes that maybe should be funny but are actually just plain weird. The conclusion is hasty. We could complain that the black and female characters lack interiority, but to be fair, no one here shows much internal life. Seething envy comprises Raymond’s entire personality. Charlie keeps repeating his alpha male koans.
Most of these problems stem from the gut renovation that Kelley performed on Wolfe’s book, placing it back in the present and writing in many elements that could cause controversy in 2024: a KKK rally, Roger’s “Too White” nickname, and, most surprisingly , an Atlanta on the verge of combusting over rumors that a black athlete raped a white heiress. In their place are generic invocations of 21st-century feminist and racial justice struggles, plus occasional digs at the real estate mogul who became our 45th president, strung together precariously with thin plot threads that strain credibility. TV has a voracious appetite for literary adaptations these days, but not all era-defining jambs stand the test of time. Better to let a sleeping Croker lie than to exhume him for a project so desperately devoid of, well, as he would say, courage.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
