Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Thankfully, we were spared the milk bottles filled with pee: "The Hoax"

I mean, I don't care how authentic Scorsese and DiCaprio wanted to be with "The Aviator." I did not need to see that as evidence of how far off the rails Howard Hughes went.

In "The Hoax," Hughes has already gone bonkers and hidden himself away. That leaves us to see him through archive footage, hear him on the phone and watch Richard Gere ape him as part of a big scam to net fame and fortune. And all without Cate Blanchett's annoying Katharine Hepburn imitation. Score!

Our story -- based on actual events, mind you -- has Gerbil Boy playing Clifford Irving, a writer who isn't struggling but wants to stay safely on the publisher teat. After his second-rate Philip Roth novel is rejected, he tells his publisher that Howard Hughes wants him to write his autobiography. Wow! Just one thing: Irving is full of sh*t.

Turns out he and a researcher buddy (a nervous Alfred Molina) are going to fake the whole thing -- cobbling together Hughes' recollections through various research and interviews, including old fart Eli Wallach. Irving's wife (Marcia Gay Harden, playing Swiss) helps him some, although they've got issues -- namely his refusal to stop sticking his d*ck inside Julie Delpy, a French tart who also wants fame and fortune.

Besides Hope Davis, who plays Irving's book contact, big guns on the publishing side include Stanley "I Work a Lot" Tucci as the top dog and Zeljko Ivanek -- a classic "That Guy" -- as the head of Life magazine. As the process goes on, they become rightfully suspicious, despite all of Gere and Molina's machinations. There's some good stuff there, from Molina flying to Mexico to send a letter to the publisher to Gere arranging for a "visit" from Hughes that falls through at the last minute. Dumb luck, that!

I didn't know a thing about this Irving-Hughes thing before "The Hoax" came out, and while some of the stuff on screen is far from accurate -- Irving apparently lived in the Mediterranean, not near New York City -- it was neat to know what I was seeing was loosely based on something that actually happened. That's wild, man.

And Gere pulls his weight, too. He's slick at first, then gets more desperate, dragging down multiple people as he comes unhinged. He comes close to going over the top a couple of times but is mostly spot-on. Say what you will about the guy ... he's done some decent work. Not sure this will push his Adventures in the Rodent Kingdom out of the first paragraph of his obit, but it's a step in the right direction.

1 Comments:

At 12:22 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

The Julie Delpy character, Nina Van Pallandt, actually had a Hollywood career of sorts in the '70s. She shows up in several Altman movies, including "The Long Goodbye" and I recently saw her on an HD movie channel in "Cutter's Way," an oddball mystery with Jeff Bridges from 1981. I think she was pretty much typecast as a cougar. You know, to use the technical term.

 

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