In 1998, Tom Wolfe published “A Man in Full,” a novel about (among other things) Charlie Croker, an Atlanta real estate developer whose business and world are falling apart, and Conrad Hensley, a worker at one of Croker's subsidiaries. whose world also falls apart when he is fired.
Now David E. Kelley has written a television miniseries, premiering Thursday on Netflix, with similar characters in similar situations in the same setting, but there are so many things different, lost or added, that adaptation hardly seems like the right word. “'A Man in Full,' by David E. Kelley, by Tom Wolfe,” might be closer to the truth.
Jeff Daniels plays Charlie, a former college football star and celebrated businessman, whom we meet at his 60th birthday party serenaded by Shania Twain. He has a young wife, Serena (Sarah Jones), an ex-wife Martha (Diane Lane), and a teenage son, Wally (Evan Roe), who has been suspended from school for expressing nonconformist thoughts.
Diane Lane plays Martha Croker, Charlie's ex-wife, in “A Man in Full.”
(Mark Hill/Netflix)
He has private planes, a big house in leafy Buckhead, a rural area called Turpmtine [sic] where he hunts quail and stallions, and a skyscraper that ostentatiously bears his name, Croker Concourse. He also has a debt of more than a billion dollars and a bank that wants his money, in short. Oh, and a bad knee. Although the details are different, and Wolfe evidently had Atlanta figures in mind as models, thoughts float easily to Donald Trump, given the profession, the tower and the debt. And narcissism, of course.
Charlie's designated pursuers are Raymond Peepgrass (Tom Pelphrey), a mid-level bank official who participated in the issuance of his loans and is now gleefully aiding in his downfall, and Harry Zale (Bill Camp), who specializes in working with fat fish. Raymond, wearing his Dean Cain Clark Kent Collection glasses, and Harry, doing push-ups on the floor of his office, are caricatures of weakness and aggression.
Among the little people, we find Conrad (Jon Michael Hill) driving a forklift in a Croker warehouse. Trying to prevent his car from being towed, he gets into a fight with a police officer and ends up in jail awaiting trial, surrounded by dangerous characters. In Kelley's rejigged flowchart, Conrad's wife, Jill (Chanté Adams), has become Charlie's executive secretary. Conrad and Jill, who are white in the book and live in California, are black in the series, giving its otherwise highly altered plot a different sociopolitical tone. (Charlie has his flaws; in fact, they are nothing more than flaws, but racism is not among them.) They are, unlike most people here, morally upright and pure of heart.
Meanwhile! Atlanta Mayor Wes Jordan (William Jackson Harper) has asked his old friend Roger White (Aml Ameen), whom Kelley also works for Charlie as general counsel, to help him with a plan to ensure his re-election, a plan which requires the participation of Charlie, whose problems are not yet public and whom Atlanta venerates as a football hero.
Conrad (Jon Michael Hill), left, and Jill (Chanté Adams) are among the characters whose backgrounds differ in the series from those in the book.
(Mark Hill/Netflix)
Performative virility, that is, sexual insecurity, is practically the theme of the series, expressed in small power games and unrepeatable phrases here except for tortuous euphemisms, when a man describes what he is going to do to another to humiliate him. (The guys are those kids). By contrast, Kelley has given the women, including Lucy Liu as Martha's friend Joyce, Jerrika Hinton as Roger's wife Henrietta, and Eline Powell as Sirja, who has a paternity suit against Raymond, more dimension. and agency than Wolfe. I thought of. And they are mostly decent.
If we take the position that the character is as important, or more important, than the plot, “A Man in Full” succeeds at least in the sense that it gives Daniels a role to enjoy. He gives Wolfe's Charlie a larger-than-life life, and even manages to evoke the viewer's sympathetic interest, or thoughtfully undermine it. But aside from Charlie, through whom every thread of the story passes, most of the other characters don't have enough or good enough material to seem quite real, and many are simply unpleasant. An unpleasant character with no inner life is simply unpleasant and uninteresting.
Is it necessary for a dramatic adaptation of a literary work to stick strictly to the source? Not really, whether the remake succeeds on its own, on par with the original in ambition, energy or tone, or is so strange as to make comparisons moot. And for what it's worth, Kelley has completely rewritten the ending.
Wolfe's book is big, long, and packed with characters and conversations; there's an earthquake and a prison break, which aren't on the menu here. (Rationalization is inevitable, and earthquakes are expensive to set up.) “A Man in Full” seems smaller, shallower, and more obvious than the novel, and on its own it doesn't seem like the best episode of an old Kelley soap opera. lawyer shows. As television, it is very similar to… television. Which, depending on what you're looking for, might be enough.
