The Hoax
***
Richard Gere, Alfred Molina, Marcia Gay Harden, Hope Davis
Directed by Lasse Hallstrom
Rated R
Opens Friday
For Melvin Dummar, the hero of Jonathan Demme’s 1980 film Melvin and Howard, reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes represented a chance to escape a life of dead-end jobs and broken dreams, to finally be the somebody he never had the discipline to become. For Clifford Irving, hero of Hallstrom’s The Hoax, Hughes represents a deserved artistic respectability, a way to forcibly grab the attention of boorish corporate suits who wouldn’t know good prose if it slapped them in the face. For both men, or at least their cinematic representations (since both are real people still living), Hughes is less a person than a symbol, and one malleable enough to serve all sorts of twisted ends.
While Demme’s Hughes narrative was a comic tragedy, Hallstrom’s is more of a tragic comedy, with a jaunty tone and a snappy pace that affords star Gere, as Irving, the chance to give his loosest performance in years. He exudes a sort of manic desperation as the mildly successful author who in the early 1970s, after seeing his latest novel rejected by his publisher, concocts from thin air the notion that he has been selected as Hughes’ official biographer. Along with his trusty sidekick and researcher (Molina), Irving sets out to learn everything he can about Hughes, all in the name of propping up his increasingly untenable charade.
Hallstrom has spent far too long in the doldrums of airy prestige pictures, and his last effort to be whimsical, 2005’s Casanova, was a bit of a mess. But here he strikes the right balance between humor and introspection, delving into Irving’s simultaneous narcissism and self-loathing while keeping the absurdity of the situation constantly apparent. He’s helped by Gere’s enthusiastic performance, and solid supporting turns from Molina and Harden, Davis and Julie Delpy as the women in Irving’s life.
There’s a bit of overreaching for political relevance and some dodgy magic realism toward the end, but as an exploration of another way that Hughes inspired (or enabled) a peculiarly American mania, the film rarely misses its mark.