Nicholas Nicastro - VIZ. ARTS . . . Between Fact and Fiction

Between Fact and Fiction
(The Hoax, 5/14/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro

Not infrequently your humble reviewer screws up, wasting his time writing about mediocrities when better fare is available. Lasse Hallström's The Hoax is case in point. This is one of the best films I've seen so far this year, and was at Cinemapolis for weeks until it left last Friday. Fortunately, in the age of DVD no movie ever really goes away. So run, don't walk, to your video store or Netflix queue and see this one.
      Viewers might be forgiven for forgetting the Clifford Irving affair, coming as it did in the scandal-rich era of Vietnam and Nixon. Irving (Cornell '51), a fine writer and even more gifted con-man, stunned the world in 1971 by announcing that he had been hired to co-write the authorized autobiography of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. Hughes, who had not been seen in public for 15 years, was scarcely available to deny this claim. Despite the fact that the "autobiography" was not authorized at all, Irving begged, borrowed, and stole many confidential documents for it, producing what by all accounts is a book of surprising truth.
      Irving got as far as depositing his $765,000 advance check in a Swiss bank before his scheme collapsed. Irving, his reseacher, and his wife Edith went to jail. The most bizarre sequel, though, was that Richard Nixon was allegedly so nervous about damaging revelations in Irving's manuscript that he sent a few amateur burglars to the Watergate to see if the Democrats had a copy.
      Of the truth of the latter this critic is not in a position to judge. Hallström (Chocolat, Casanova) has, in any case, produced one of the best con-game flicks in a long time. As Irving, Richard Gere regains some of the edge of his pre-Pretty Woman days, perfectly capturing the foolhardy brilliance of a born confabulator liberated from reality. Good as Gere is, Alfred Molina almost steals the show as his sweaty, inveterately guilty-looking sidekick, Dick Suskind.
      Though the real Irving was only peripherally involved in the production, the script by William Wheeler amounts to a joyful apologia, playing out how fiction and truth can become so tightly intertwined that the result can be better, more provocative, and even (as the consequences for Nixon prove) more constructive lies. The fact that the film is called The Hoax is evidence enough of its infatuation with Irving, since that's what he called it. The word "hoax," after all, suggests something of an amusing prank— Piltdown Man, alien autopsies, Paul McCartney's death—perpetrated as much to embarrass people as for direct profit. A more accurate description of what Irving pulled would have been The Fraud.
      It's hard to say whether it's nostalgia finally catching up with the shag-and-leatherette era, but the seventies have rarely looked so good as in The Hoax. Hope Davis, as Irving's editor Andrea Tate, looks particularly at home—all she's missing is a pair of horn-rims. In this context, Irving's demise even has a whiff of the tragic. If all this happened today, one imagines the whole thing coming to an even more absurd end, with Irving subjected to a moralistic drubbing on Oprah Winfrey's couch, a la James Frey for A Million Little Pieces. Judging from his movie self, Irving would at least have made his humiliation as lively as his triumph.

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