Grade: B+
Howard Hughes might have been a wacko, and as a enthusiast moviemaker he was no great shakes (yes, he produced the “Scarface,” but also “The Outlaw” and John Wayne’s Genghis Khan turn in “The Conqueror”), but for others he’s proven a good cinematic vehicle to explore a sort of iconic American super-weirdness. That’s most obvious in Jonathan Demme’s “Melvin and Howard” and Martin Scorsese’s “The Aviator,” but “The Hoax” is a nice addition to the group, even if it doesn’t quite equal those pictures.
In focusing on Clifford Irving, the writer who tried to profit from Hughes’s notoriety by selling a fraudulent “autobiography” of the reclusive mogul, Lasse Hallstrom’s movie is more in synch with Demme’s, which centered on the hapless Melvin Dummar, who claimed once to have given the bedraggled Hughes a lift and later claimed to be the old man’s legal heir. Irving isn’t nearly as lovable a schlub as Paul LeMat made of hapless Melvin, but in a fine switch from the smooth-as-silk characters he usually plays, Richard Gere makes him a desperate but engaging rogue as he dupes media moguls at McGraw-Hill and Time-Life into believing his fantasy and showering him with money.
And Gere has a fine partner in Alfred Molina, whose turn as Richard Suskin, a nervous, befuddled fellow who becomes Irving’s reluctant “researcher,” could be called the best thing he’s done in years if he weren’t so consistently good, even as Doc Oc in “Spider-Man 2.” In fact, Molina is so good that he often outshines Gere, without ever fully dimming the star’s lustre.
“The Hoax” also offers fine opportunities for an assortment of character actors who play the corporate types Irving and Suskin fool. Hope Davis, as the editor who sparks the whole plot by deep-sixing the publication of the novel Irving had hoped would make his career and then falls for his scam, is the most notable of them, and she’s excellent, but Stanley Tucci and Zeljko Ivanek are equally fine. Some of the sequences in the boardrooms and corporate offices tend toward near-slapstick comedy as Irving and Suskin try to escape what seems almost certain unmasking, but even those are handled with such aplomb that they bring smiles rather than grimaces. The redoubtable Eli Wallach also has a smashing cameo as an old Hughes hand who unwittingly provides Irving with some material he can use to persuade others of his bona fides.
There are some aspects of the film, unfortunately, that don’t quite hold up their end. One is the material on Irving’s personal life—with Marcia Gay Harden as his long-suffering wife (who’s drawn into his shenanigans) and Julie Delpy as the “celebrity” with whom he was once involved. Both are excellent actresses, but this “domestic” side of William Wheeler’s script isn’t as sharply drawn as the larger forgery plot. And while the plot thread implicating the Nixon administration (and Hughes’s supposed use of Irving to stick it to the president for past failures to help him) will be a hoot for viewers old enough to remember the early seventies, it might be a bit murky for others less familiar with the era to grasp.
But then this is a film for adults, mingling serious issues having to do with media manipulation with an exuberant take on an entrepreneurial-minded but charming scoundrel who takes on the establishment and almost snookers them all (but who may also be a pawn of forces he thinks he’s controlling). And it’s not only well written, directed and acted, but nicely photographed by Oliver Stapleton (who pulls off some great tracking shots), sharply edited by Andrew Mondshein, and ebulliently scored by Carter Burwell.
“The Hoax” is, of course, itself a cinematic sleight of hand, a trick that turns a somewhat unseemly historical footnote into a microcosm for the spirit of an age that now seems a roiling pool of dark motives and often bungled conspiracies. But it pulls off the trick with surprising deftness and amusement. And it certainly succeeds better in pulling our leg than the unfortunate Irving did.