The Hoax

'The Hoax' is an endlessly charming and witty film, blending comedy with drama for great and successful results. Richard Gere is at the top of his game as he commands the screen, prosthetic nose included. Lasse Hallstrom's, whose films included 'Chocolate' and 'The Cider House Rules', keen sense of direction keeps the film fresh and engaging. It ultimately makes for a genuinely pleasant experience and one of the year's better pictures.

Desperate for success and wealth, Clifford Irving is about to pull off the hoax of the century. Set in the 1970s, Irving has pitched and sold his idea of a Howard Hughes biography to a premiere publishing company. Problem is, none of it's true. Irving, with his friend Dick Susskind at his side, will spin an intricate web of lies as he sets out to compile a fraud biography of Hughes and set-up staged interviews with the wealthy recluse. He soon becomes so deep in all of his lies that it seems inconceivable that he'll find his way out. But with each twist and turn, Irving matches with one of his own.

What makes 'The Hoax' work? It appears to be nearly flawless. Director Lasse Hallstrom keeps viewers in the moment with a nice, speedy pace. And so 'The Hoax' never wears out its welcome. It's such a quirky and original project that entertains without taking itself too seriously. It's light, witty humor mixed with dramatic effect to create what is at times a film with a dual personality, but it works out just right. 'The Hoax' has an intelligence that's sharper than most, keeping the elaborate and offbeat heist cleverly afloat rather than becoming dull and over worn. An outrageously true story of an outrageously true crime.

You may say that 'The Hoax' ultimately works because of one man, and that's Richard Gere. His best performance in years, Gere commands the screen as the man behind the heist (and nose). He's sharp, humorous, tragic, and flawed. The whole package. He almost forces you to emotionally invest in his character, because he's almost too charming not to. You'll find yourself rooting for him and his cause. It's one of the best performances of the year. Alfred Molina, Hope Davis, and Marcia Gay Harden all benefit from a great script. Molina stars as the humorously bumbling sidekick who possesses what Gere does not: a conscious. Davis is wonderful as the publishing agent, and while Harden's role doesn't present her with much screen time, she delivers a strong outing with what she's given.

'The Hoax' is a remarkably well-made, well-told account of a bizarre heist. The truth is stranger than fiction, and while it's wildly strange, it's wonderfully fun and silly yet tragic and serious when it has to be. 'The Hoax' is no hand-me-down of the heist genre, but rather a worthy and memorable addition. It's one of the year's best films, and no doubt you'll get a kick out of 'The Hoax'.

Now here's a movie almost doomed to the back pages of cinema history. Only playing at one cinema in my area and having grossed a mere 3 million in two weeks at the box office, it might just be only a matter of time before this movie fades away and is forgotten. That would be quite the shame as the Hoax is quite the movie, and a real treat for the very few people who are actually willing to give it a chance.

"The Hoax" is the story of Clifford Irving, a struggling author pitching ideas to the McGraw-Hill company. As his most recent novel is blasted by critics before release, a desperate Clifford promises his editors and publishers the story of the century, without having precisely figured out what that is. That is until he stumbles onto it (literally). Clifford decides to con the whole world into believing that the reclusive enigmatic billionaire Howard Hughes has commissioned him to write his autobiography.

What follows is an intriguing and enthralling romp through the mazes of lies and deceptions that Clifford and is "co-author" Dick Suskind have spun. Eventually, the fictitious story snowballs past anything the two writers could believe as revelations into accounts of fraud and blackmail begin to penetrate the highest offices, and it all begins to come crashing down.

"The Hoax" is a character driven drama of the highest caliber. The sharp direction and writing, and excellent casting make it hard to ignore. Richard Gere and Alfred Molina give career high performances, and the supporting Hope Davis and Marcia Gay Hayden just round the film off nicely.

This is one of the best movies of 2007 so far. It may not have as wide an appeal as other outings, but it's thoroughly enjoyable all the same.

4.5/5

I really enjoyed this film from beginning to end and generally I'm difficult to please. I'm a little older than the average audience and so I knew this story really well having watched it unfold at the time. I also remember watching Orson Welles' masterpiece 'F for Fake', based around the same subject and anyone who's seen 'The Hoax' should watch 'F for Fake'. Richard Gere, and in fact, all the cast, were at their best and delivered a great script with all the tension and dynamics it needed. Gere and Molina worked very well together and I'd say it was probably Molina's best performance to date. Beautifully shot and cut, it was pacy but not too pacy like many current films. I liked the few library shots to help with creating a feeling for the period and of course, the music helped with that too. The story was told well, although if you weren't quite familiar with the outline of what happened, there could be some moments of doubt. However, knowing the story well made it all the more enjoyable.

Lasse Halstrom isn't out, as a film-making, to make really extreme and probing insights into what goes into a prankster/forger like Clifford Irving. Maybe it's because he, like I, saw Orson Welles's film F For Fake, which covered similar ground and has the only substantial footage of Clifford Irving on record and in full bloom with his BS meter going sky-high. That film, overall, dug very deep into what is to have forgery, a hoax, as part of personality. Halstrom doesn't quite get that, but nevertheless he's made an entertaining mini-saga of a man- or rather men in this case- who went to the edge of credibility and almost got away with the whole shebang. His story, as covered as well in part in F for Fake, is about Irving's incredibly smart and incredibly stupid attempt at passing off as his own the autobiography of Howard Hughes, then the notoriously reclusive and nutty billionaire with his fingers in enterprises all over the world. He passes off Hughes's handwriting to the publishers and lawyers as his, even as it's really Irving who wrote it all, and even went so far as to have mock audio recordings of Irving AS Hughes to get down in the book via assistant Dick Suskind. As the walls seem to be closing in on their scam, as well as Irving's marriage, it goes as far as mass printings of the book Irving presents- until the 'real' Hughes makes a press conference call (call, of course), to disprove the book altogether as a hoax.

Halstrom surprisingly makes his film light and dark in tone, depending on what stage the story is in, and it's even fun at times to see Irving and Suskind go about their risk-taking maneuvers to get all documents and information they can on Hughes, as if it's guerrilla research. Then as the despair of constant lying increases, and the threat of capture and revelation is nearer, Halstrom makes it more like a paranoid thriller. This latter part may actually be not quite as convincing- so to speak of course, as one can't be sure entirely what's true or not in The Hoax- because, simply, one might not see Irving so much as a crazy person ala Hughes so much as a kind of strange artist-cum-professional at what he does: to make himself believe the BS before he even feeds it to others. Scenes like Irving getting caught by Hughes's "secret agents" in the middle of the night are not as striking as Halstrom might have intended, even as all the while the performances are still good. And the realm of placing the story in context of the times is hit or miss; it works, to be sure, when going into the Nixon administration sections because it's crucial to the story (and, according to some articles on the film, is possibly really accurate), though putting in the footage of Vietnam and protesters and so forth are sort of padding to environment and period. The music, costumes, locations (i.e. Las Vegas) and simple political ramifications make it enough.

This being said, The Hoax provides the audience with some very effective performances. Gere, under the right director, can be terrific, and this is one of his best performances in years, as he balances out Irving's higher aspirations of wealth and notoriety with his latter plunge into confusing his own personality with that of Hughes, with suspicions of everything or anyone around him. The filmmakers wisely don't make Irving very sympathetic, and Gere plays this for all it's worth with moments of charm, tension, and delusions of grandeur played out wonderfully. However, if Gere is good, Alfred Molina is better as Suskind, Irving's collaborator and the real behind-the-scenes guy who helps make Irving's fabrications all the more palatable, like hiding documents out of the Pentagon or flying to another country to mail an envelope. Suskind, unlike Irving, ends up dealing with the hoax with more of a psychological/moral burden, and it ends up weighing on his conscience like a brick. It might make Suskind the more conventional character in the movie, but Molina makes him very real and more of the tragic case than Gere's Irving. Molina's track record, at the least, remains untarnished. Other supporting players like Marcia Hay Harden, Julie Delpy, Eli Wallach, and Stanley Tucci are better than average here.

The Hoax is a good treat in this month's lot of schlock and big-budget trash by sticking close to making it an actor's movie, and sort of a bittersweet take on what a hoax does in such a grand scale as that of Howard Hughes, and what it does to a person the longer and more intense it goes on for.

Saw a sneak preview of this earlier this evening. Not bad as some other comments would have you believe, but not perfect either. The historical details are a bit inaccurate in some areas, but those are relatively minor ones which don't affect the story too much. At it's core, the film focuses on the lies told by Clifford Irving and how he charmed everyone into believing them. The lies don't just affect his writing career, but also the lives of those around him and eventually comes to the point where it's difficult to distinguish fact from fiction in what Irving says, a task which is made all the more difficult given the eccentricity of nearly everything done by Howard Hughes during that period of time. Overall, the film isn't too bad, the main characters are nicely developed, the plot is interesting, and the acting isn't bad. The subtle 1970s touches (vintage Coca Cola and Tab cans, news footage, hairstyles, commercials, cars, Watergate, etc) also make it fun to watch. Overall, the story, acting, and the attention to detail force me to give this a 8/10 despite the few flaws here and there. Definitely a must see for the Howard Hughes buffs along with "The Aviator".