The Hoax

The Hoax brings a sensational publishing scam to life, writes Donald Clarke

MORE than 20 years ago, Lasse Hallström,a Swedish director best known for working with ABBA, delivered an extraordinary little film called My Life as a Dog. Following its international success, Lasse was biffed on the head by the Weinstein brothers and spirited away to a basement.

Once a year he was allowed out to direct a plodding adaptation of some worthy middlebrow novel. Chocolat, The Shipping Newsand The Cider House Ruleswere all nominated for Oscars, but Hallström's reputation has not exactly blossomed. It seemed fair to assume he was lost to the world.

Now along comes The Hoax. The picture has its flaws, but it is easily the best thing Hallström has directed since Ronald Reagan was in the White House.

It helps that he has happened upon an absolutely fascinating true(ish) story. In the early 1970s Clifford Irving, a modestly successful writer, convinced the McGraw-Hill publishing house that Howard Hughes - by then a complete recluse - had hired him to co-author the billionaire's autobiography.

Irving gambled that Hughes had become too disturbed and withdrawn to consider emerging in public to denounce the hoax. Besides which, if the mogul did make such a statement, Irving could always sigh sadly while rotating an index finger in the area of his temple. Who are you going to believe: the babbling fruitcake or the distinguished writer?

Richard Gere, an actor who, like Michael Douglas, is always at his best when playing sleazy, manages to make something interesting of the painted facade with which Irving surrounds himself. Once the hoax gets under way, Gere allows dashing eyes and a pinched mouth to suggest the furious engines of mendacity at work in Irving's psyche.

When confronted with apparently irrefutable evidence of his fraud, we hear him finally unload a relieved confession, but, as the camera drifts from the back of his head to his face, we see that his lips are not moving. This momentary impulse towards honesty repressed, he launches into a new series of fantastic inventions. The Hoaxis, as much as anything else, concerned with the addictive nature of lies.

Decent support is offered from Alfred Molina as Clifford's less confident collaborator, and from Hope Davis and Stanley Tucci as the publishers who, having parted with obscene advances, cannot allow themselves to suspect Irving's intentions. Marcia Gay Harden, the universe's least restrained actor, plays Irving's Scandinavian wife and, to the undoubted regret of scenery that would prefer to remain unchewed, behaves exactly as you would expect.

Sadly, the picture does lose its way somewhat in the last act when Gere, occasionally sporting a thin moustache and flying jacket, is asked to convey the psychological amalgamation of Irving and Hughes. The conceit asks too much of the actor and weighs down an otherwise lively story.

Some American critics have found more serious flaws in the script's cavalier approach to the facts. The film begins with an entirely fictional episode in which the people from McGraw-Hill wait for Hughes to land his helicopter on their building. Later, in another divergence from the truth, we are asked to believe that Irving got the idea for the hoax when he saw a Caribbean hotel cleared of guests to accommodate Hughes. Most outrageously, the screenplay dares to argue that Irving's actions ultimately triggered the Watergate debacle.

It is, surely, a deliberate decision by screenwriter William Wheeler to scatter such doubt and uncertainty about the place. The Hoaxpresents an unreliable narrative about an unreliable narrative and, as such, allows the viewer a similarly unsettling experience to that provided briefly, before the book's withdrawal, to readers of Howard Hughes's autobiography. Believe what you wish.