reviews
Hoax | by Lee Marshall (Screendaily.com) | Oct 15 2006
As struttingly confident as its main character, true-life literary fraudster Clifford Irving, The Hoax is far and away Lasse Hallström's best American film yet. Featuring a Richard Gere who has finally cast off his mid-term career doldrums to reveal himself as an actor of Machiavellian charisma and authority, it initially plays as a picaresque Catch Me If You Can-style biopic of a handsome US chancer. But though it never loses its sense of humour, The Hoax soon morphs into a more complex tale about self-seeding deceptions and the way that money and power act as the compost that allow them to grow and spread.
Though Gere is not the box-office draw he once was (witness the undeserved box-office flop of Bee Season), Miramax can expect to do well out of this likeable, dynamic product domestically off the back of strong critical support and upbeat word-of-mouth.
Overseas prospects look strong too, although the film will appeal to younger and more urban markets than much of Hallström's previous oeuvre. Awards-season action is likely, with attention not only for Gere?s bravura performance but also to William Wheeler's enjoyably tight and tricksy script, which plays its own hoaxes on the audience. Production designer Mark Ricker's tasty recreation of the post-hippy, pre-Watergate years should also be in with a shout.
In 1971, jobbing writer Clifford Irving pitched what sounded like the book industry coup of the decade to top New York publisher McGraw Hill: an authorised biography of Howard Hughes that the millionaire recluse had allegedly asked Irving to write, on the condition that the project should remain secret until publication.
It was, of course, a hoax: Irving and his friend and accomplice, archive researcher Richard Suskind, were banking on the fact that Hughes would never go public to denounce the book as a fraud. So convincing were the Hughes letters forged by Irving, so packed with believable detail the interview transcripts he later fabricated, that McGraw Hill and Life Magazine (which paid a large sum to publish extracts from the book) bought the lie wholesale, paying Irving and Hughes a total of $765,000 (leveraged to a million in the film), which his Swiss wife deposited in a bank account back home.
It was the Swiss police investigation into these payments that eventually blew the lid on the affair: Irving returned the money and served 17 months in prison, while Edith and Suskind received shorter sentences.
Wheeler's script sticks to the bare facts of the story, limiting itself to inventing a couple of episodes, including one in which Irving pays a hooker to seduce Suskind. The characters, though, are given a dramatic logic that has little to do with their real life counterparts.
Gere plays Irving as a conflicted charmer powered by sheer force of self-belief, while the Suskind of the film, played by Alfred Molina, becomes a weak, nervous but loyal sidekick, a voice of conscience too much in love with the friend it should be cautioning.
Marcia Gay Harden's take on Irving's wife Edith begins in comic mode but gains pathos as we see how ready she too is to be taken in by the two-timing Irving.
There are scenes of near slapstick, as when a reluctant Suskind snaffles a manuscript from the US Defence Department in his trousers; while Hope Davis and Stanley Tucci give enjoyable sideline performances as, respectively, Irving's editor and Life magazine supremo Shelton Fisher, two tough cookies who are so blinded by the glory of the Hughes deal that they become putty in Irving's hands.
The really engaging aspect of the film, though, is the way that Gere's character first builds a credible fantasy world out of scraps of memory and research, and then begins to inhabit it like a Sim City player confusing his self-built virtual metropolis with the real world. This increasingly hallucinatory descent is saved from mannerism because it is grounded in the audience's own shifting judgements of Iriving: he charms and manipulates us as well as his friends and publishers.
The Hoax barrels along at a cracking pace, and Hallström adopts an informal approach to structure and editing that suits the period well. The dialogue is spot on too, smart without being smart ass. A catchy jazz-inflected soundtrack by longtime Coen Brothers collaborator Carter Burwell, backed up by period music by Richie Havens, The Rolling Stones and others, add to the verve of the exercise.
Though Gere is not the box-office draw he once was (witness the undeserved box-office flop of Bee Season), Miramax can expect to do well out of this likeable, dynamic product domestically off the back of strong critical support and upbeat word-of-mouth.
Overseas prospects look strong too, although the film will appeal to younger and more urban markets than much of Hallström's previous oeuvre. Awards-season action is likely, with attention not only for Gere?s bravura performance but also to William Wheeler's enjoyably tight and tricksy script, which plays its own hoaxes on the audience. Production designer Mark Ricker's tasty recreation of the post-hippy, pre-Watergate years should also be in with a shout.
In 1971, jobbing writer Clifford Irving pitched what sounded like the book industry coup of the decade to top New York publisher McGraw Hill: an authorised biography of Howard Hughes that the millionaire recluse had allegedly asked Irving to write, on the condition that the project should remain secret until publication.
It was, of course, a hoax: Irving and his friend and accomplice, archive researcher Richard Suskind, were banking on the fact that Hughes would never go public to denounce the book as a fraud. So convincing were the Hughes letters forged by Irving, so packed with believable detail the interview transcripts he later fabricated, that McGraw Hill and Life Magazine (which paid a large sum to publish extracts from the book) bought the lie wholesale, paying Irving and Hughes a total of $765,000 (leveraged to a million in the film), which his Swiss wife deposited in a bank account back home.
It was the Swiss police investigation into these payments that eventually blew the lid on the affair: Irving returned the money and served 17 months in prison, while Edith and Suskind received shorter sentences.
Wheeler's script sticks to the bare facts of the story, limiting itself to inventing a couple of episodes, including one in which Irving pays a hooker to seduce Suskind. The characters, though, are given a dramatic logic that has little to do with their real life counterparts.
Gere plays Irving as a conflicted charmer powered by sheer force of self-belief, while the Suskind of the film, played by Alfred Molina, becomes a weak, nervous but loyal sidekick, a voice of conscience too much in love with the friend it should be cautioning.
Marcia Gay Harden's take on Irving's wife Edith begins in comic mode but gains pathos as we see how ready she too is to be taken in by the two-timing Irving.
There are scenes of near slapstick, as when a reluctant Suskind snaffles a manuscript from the US Defence Department in his trousers; while Hope Davis and Stanley Tucci give enjoyable sideline performances as, respectively, Irving's editor and Life magazine supremo Shelton Fisher, two tough cookies who are so blinded by the glory of the Hughes deal that they become putty in Irving's hands.
The really engaging aspect of the film, though, is the way that Gere's character first builds a credible fantasy world out of scraps of memory and research, and then begins to inhabit it like a Sim City player confusing his self-built virtual metropolis with the real world. This increasingly hallucinatory descent is saved from mannerism because it is grounded in the audience's own shifting judgements of Iriving: he charms and manipulates us as well as his friends and publishers.
The Hoax barrels along at a cracking pace, and Hallström adopts an informal approach to structure and editing that suits the period well. The dialogue is spot on too, smart without being smart ass. A catchy jazz-inflected soundtrack by longtime Coen Brothers collaborator Carter Burwell, backed up by period music by Richie Havens, The Rolling Stones and others, add to the verve of the exercise.
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