>>REVIEW
THE HOAX
STARRING Richard Gere, Marcia Gay Harden, Hope Davis, Alfred Molina, Eli Wallach and Julie Delpy
DIRECTED BY Lasse Hallstrom
Opens Friday, April 6
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"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" — Voltaire
This famous quote from the late, great French humanist (on humanity’s intrinsic need to believe in something bigger than itself) strangely, yet fittingly seeped into my consciousness as I attempted to peel away the layers of The Hoax. Director Lasse Hallstrom’s film is an exquisitely realized reflection on success, excess and the pursuit of immortality via one’s own ambition or, in other words, the new religion of reputation.
And while I haven’t the space to elaborate on the ways this quote can be applied to the film, I will say this – in the case of Clifford Irving, Howard Hughes was God.
Irving (played by Richard Gere) is the infamous novelist who, in 1971, capitalized on a media fixation surrounding the reclusive Hughes and the greed of publishing firms by falsely claiming to have been hired by the eccentric tycoon to pen his autobiography. Increasingly obsessed with Hughes himself and based on his correct assumption that "A man who says something completely implausible will always be believed," Irving succeded in swindling McGraw-Hill for $1 million, even getting his book to print, before his prodigious web of deceit collapsed around him.
Hallstrom presents his story steeped in the context of its history. Using archival news footage of rioting Vietnam protestors and Richard Nixon’s unravelling Watergate scandal, we witness the mind of a man, once emboldened by his own ambition, slip slowly into conflict, delusion and, ultimately, defeat. It’s a mind that becomes the personification of its time.
Props also go out to William Wheeler’s challenging script, which refuses to vilify the man who duped an entire country for his own selfish wants and actually goes to great lengths to have us identify or at least sympathize with him on one or more levels. Be it through a broader depiction of an opportunistic visionary, or as a man conflicted between his desire for a loving personal relationship and his desperate need for acceptance through recognition, Wheeler’s script and Gere’s performance flesh out a character embodying the true complexity of human nature.
At once heroic and pitiful, victorious and tragic, you will leave the theatre with an opinion of Irving that is as muddled and subjective as life itself. |
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