“The Hoax”Miramax FilmsDirected by Lasse HallstrmScreenplay by William Wheeler, based on the novel by Clifford IrvingStarring: Richard Gere, Alfred Molina, Marcia Gay Harden, Hope Davis, John Carter, Zeljko Ivanek, Julie Delpy and Stanley TucciRated R/115 minutesOpened April 6, 2007Two-and-a-half out of four stars
Clifford Irving must have been an awfully good con man. Richard Gere is not.
As Irving, Gere successfully — and rather easily — convinces a multinational corporation that he is in correspondence with legendary eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes. He tells wild stories about Hughes. He cheats his way into the possession of confidential government files. He persuades corporate lackeys to give him a six-figure advance. He even convinces his doting wife that he’s a faithful husband.
The thing is, he’s not a very good con man. He lies and swindles and makes phony promises and, for a time at least, gets away with all of it, yet he does so with precious little charm or charisma.
He stammers, he sweats, he makes mistakes and has to backtrack. And if he’s such a successful confidence man, you’d think he’d have a little?you know, confidence. But more often than not, he doesn’t show it. He seems like he’s lying. He’s a bad liar. There’s no reason to believe that any one of his victims would believe a single word he says.
But all of them eat it up. Constantly.
It’s not that the events are implausible — indeed, “The Hoax” is based on the exploits of the real Irving, who conned a lot of people with a completely fabricated “autobiography” of Hughes and swindled his way into a lot of money in the process. But Gere’s performance doesn’t make any of it seem believable-or even reasonable.
There is one scene in a boardroom in which Irving (Gere) convinces the fat cats at both McGraw-Hill Publishing Company and Time-Life that they have upset Hughes and that he demands a $1-million advance or the book deal is off. In this one scene (the best scene in the film), Gere exudes the brashness we might expect from a man whose lies get bigger and bolder as the stakes get higher. But that attitude is strangely missing from the rest of the movie, despite the fact that Irving gets himself into jam after jam and constantly has to lie his way out of trouble.
Gere is not a bad actor, but a role that requires this much tenacity exposes his limitations.
“The Hoax” is similar in form to Billy Ray’s film “Shattered Glass” about former The New Republic writer Stephen Glass, who was caught after fabricating more than 20 stories. Hayden Christensen is hardly the world’s best actor, but as Glass, he was so convincing as a storyteller and so damn likeable that it was easy to see how he pulled the wool over his editors’ eyes.
“The Hoax” doesn’t have the same effect. The script, by William Wheeler, takes some clever angles with the story, and director Lasse Hallstrm — taking a brief reprieve from his patented pomposity and heavy-handed symbolism — erratically tries to blur the line between Irving’s half-lies and half-truths.
The film goes down easy and is effortlessly enjoyable on one level. It’s an interesting story in and of itself. However, certain qualities of the film are tempered by too many notable flaws. Gere is either miscast or misdirected, and Marcia Gay Harden as Irving’s wife Edith is awful. Of the major roles, only Alfred Molina, Irving’s friend and research assistant Dick Suskind, pulls his weight.
“The Hoax” tells a compelling enough story, but there’s nothing to really grab a hold of. It’s often said of real-life, strange-but-true stories that “if this were a movie, no one would believe it.”
“The Hoax” is one of those stories, and I knew that it was true — I’ve read all about it. Even so, I still didn’t believe it. The real Clifford Irving made fools of hundreds of people; Richard Gere may act the part, but he didn’t fool me.