Week of April 4, 2007, Issue #598
FILM
The Hoax pulls a fast one
JOSEF BRAUN / josef@vueweekly.com
Clifford Irving must have been a hell of a liar back in his prime, and talented liars usually possess the innate understanding that a really good lie is almost always half true.
Irving may have been, strictly speaking, shamelessly swindling the higher-ups at McGraw-Hill when he claimed to be selling them the greatest book of the 20th century, but he did in fact produce what must be considered one of its greatest hoaxes. Irving’s fraudulent autobiography of eccentric billionaire recluse Howard Hughes was a stunt whose grandeur worked in exact tandem with its audacity, because its so often audacity itself that endows a lie with its seductive power.
Lasse Hallström’s The Hoax, based on Irving’s own book about his misadventures, is, perhaps inevitably, not as seductive as I imagine Irving must have been. Hallström, director of such middlebrow confections as Chocolat and Casanova, is certainly not a terribly audacious filmmaker. His overriding concern with pleasing the broadest possible audience tends to soften whatever edge his material might promise, and in the case of The Hoax, it also sucks a lot of the real fun out to boot.
Written by William Wheeler, The Hoax seems custom-fit to be the middle picture in a prestigious triple feature bookended by Orson Welles’s F for Fake, which features Irving, and The Aviator, which recreates the life of Hughes, Irving’s great subject.
But The Hoax has its inherent problems: it’s a rousing, root-for-the-outlaw tale of true American crime, one that resonates effortlessly with the culture of celebrity mystique, but it’s also saddled with ethical quandaries that thwart the film’s ostensible family entertainment value. Thanks largely to its terrific cast, The Hoax is pretty good as a caper, but far less successful as a morality tale about the self-perpetuating power of lies.
Irving is played by Richard Gere, and, in contrast with his sombre, rather bland performances in movies like Bee Season or Autumn in New York, it’s a treat to see him embody the equal parts exhilaration and desperation that accompany Irving’s consummate con. Looking younger and livelier than he has in ages, Gere works that handsome poker face with sinister grace.
It’s just too bad that Hallström has to blunt some of Gere’s better moments with his impatient pacing and feel-good music cues: the high-five guitar opening of CCR’s “Up Around the Bend” stomps all over Gere’s performance more than once in a soundtrack annoyingly cluttered with golden oldies.
Alfred Molina plays Dick Susskind, a writer, researcher and Irving’s mostly willing partner-in-crime, and though he’s sometimes stuck in the awkward role of Irving’s conscience (which in reality is non-existent), his considerable comic talents aren’t entirely wasted. Molina gets to turn up the tension repeatedly and entertainingly as the fumbling, nervous sidekick, and he even gets to be in Hallström’s best sight gag: a shot of a sweaty Molina improvising his way out of perdition in the Life Magazine offices during an interrogation, while a giant framed photo of the Hindenburg crash hangs directly beside him.
Such moments pepper The Hoax and keep it highly watchable, as do the fine performances from Hope Davis as Irving’s McGraw-Hill liaison and Marcia Gay Harden as Irving’s exotic and lovable but suffering and gradually incriminated wife.
Once the charming devil meets his inevitable comeuppance there’s basically nowhere left for this thing to go, but at least the actors make Irving’s tale a memorable ride into humiliation, infamy and, if Wheeler has his facts straight, even a sort of quiet, accidental heroism. According to Irving, he and Susskind’s research into Hughes’s presidential affiliations may have cracked Watergate before Woodward and Bernstein. But then, who the hell’s going to believe the guy? V
Opens Fri, Apr 6
The Hoax
Directed by Lasse Hallström
Written by William Wheeler
Starring Richard Gere, Alfred Molina,
Marcia Gay Harden, Hope Davis