Dir. Lasse Hallström, US, 2006, 116 mins
Cast: Richard Gere, Alfred Molina, Marcia Gay Harden, Stanley Tucci
Review By Richard Badley
Many thought Richard Gere had put the final nail in his own coffin after throwing himself on Shilpa Shetty like some dirty drunken uncle but luckily The Hoax has come along to preserve the white-haired ‘humanitarian’ for at least another year. With his hair dyed dark and Woody Allen styled banter, he transforms himself into the real-life author Clifford Irving who, in the early 70s, nearly succeeded in passing off a whopper of a lie before finding himself caught in one of the greatest literary scandals of the century.
At a career low, Irving desperately needs a hit. Searching for a subject he becomes obsessed with aviation billionaire Howard Hughes (for background notes check out Scorsese’s biopic The Aviator) who also happens, rather handily, to be a barmy recluse. In a bold move, Irving fakes a handwritten letter from Hughes claiming that Irving himself is the only author worthy of penning his official biography, the definitive word of a man who shunned the public eye. Promising the “great novel of the 20th century” Irving, along with bumbling co-writer Dick Susskind (“why couldn’t you have just said of the decade?”), finds himself having to live up to his eager publishers expectations and actually deliver the $1million book. So begins a catalogue of extravagant lies, from impersonated tape recordings to outright robbery, to try and preserve Irving’s reputation as well as his rocky marriage to Edith (Harden) who trusts Irving as much as one would trust Gere standing next to a Bollywood beauty.
Treading the line between artistic licence and actual fact, The Hoax feels a lot like Billy Ray’s Shattered Glass (about a prodigal young journalist who fancified a lot of his articles) but with its protagonists downright cheats from the start, the fun comes from watching them faking it from one sweaty scene to the next. The early escapades provide the best moments as Irving and Susskind (a magnificent Molina forming the other half of the double-act) rip-off manuscripts from former Hughes employees and blag their way through meetings with the clueless moneymen; Gere is ice cool retelling a story about an encounter with Hughes, Molina blurts out “he gave me a prune.” There are some moments of technical brilliance where the viewer thinks Irving has confessed all but a delicious camera pan reveals he’s done no such thing and Gere buries himself in the role, he’s even better when aping Hughes’ Texan drawl, yet the closing scenes give the actor too much room to show off.
Inevitably for Irving, the weight of the lies cause his new found celebrity to come crashing around him and paranoia sets in while Swedish director Hallström looses his grip on the story, letting Gere run away with it. Come the end, Susskind is gone and Irving battles the dreaded ‘men in black’, somehow thinking Hughes actually wants him to publish the book in order to rattle Nixon’s cage and avoid his airline TWA having to shell-out a hefty fine. The conspiracy theories are all very well but leave the story frayed and it’s sometimes hard to gauge what’s actually going on outside Irving’s delusions of grandeur.
Given that The Hoax is based on Irving’s book of the same name, which details his failed attempt at deceiving readers, it is subject matter that has to be approached with some degree of scepticism and Hallström succeeds in largely avoiding the wild hearsay and creates a fun, screwball atmosphere. The likeable pairing of Gere and Molina keeps the film breezy but intriguing and Hallström continues his transition from stuffy drama to caper stories in similar tone to his recent retelling of Casanova. Gere’s vanity aside, in a summer of wizards and robots, The Hoax is an equally tall tale infectiously played out but one for more grown-up suspenders of disbelief.
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