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F for famous fake

The libertine who made biography fiction
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
September 12th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Richard and Howard. Gere channels Hughes in a fine, if fraudulent, film.
The Hoax

Directed by Lasse Hallstrom
With Richard Gere, Alfred Molina, Hope Davis, Macia Gay Harden, Julie Delpy, Eli Wallach, Stanley Tucci and John Carter

The Hoax, Lasse Hallström’s film about the famously fake authorized biography of Howard Hughes by Clifford Irving, is itself a bit of a fraud, but one that still manages to be both entertaining and instructive. Its analysis of how a group of highly intelligent people fell for a con job ably serves as an indictment of wishful thinking. Seven years into a decade that seems dedicated to forcing reason to ride pillion to whim, The Hoax is nothing less than topical.
Hallström has moved from his period of publisher’s backlist cinema (Chocolat, The Shipping News, The Cider House Rules) to a new interest in exploring the world of intellectual rogues. His film prior to The Hoax, Casanova, was an engaging, if often overdone, romp of the brilliant libertine. Though a rather suburbanized version, Clifford Irving shares a number of similarities with Casanova. He certainly was no failure with women (having bedded and fled a few models in his day), and was always an impressive writer.
Irving was also, like Casanova, too clever by half, and his demonic energy and power for invention finally got the best of him — though not before Irving was able to drag half of the U.S. publishing industry down into a scandal over a fictitious biography.
His career as a novelist stalled, Irving (Richard Gere) dreams up a scheme of writing a biography of the millionaire shut-in Hughes and passing it off as authorized. With the help of his writing chum Dick Suskind (Alfred Molina), who is himself struggling over a children’s biography of Richard I (what to do about the king’s
homosexuality?), Irving begins compiling Hughes’
story.
As the author of Fake, the 1969 study of famed art forger Elmyr de Hory, Irving was a bit of an expert on creative counterfeiting. Studying Hughes’ handwriting from back issues of Newsweek, he begins to produce reams of correspondence from Hughes to him, which he will use to strengthen his case to his publishers at McGraw-Hill.
 His editor, Andrea Tate (Hope Davis), is the first credulous victim. She’s soon followed by the sharper heads at McGraw-Hill, from Shelton Fisher (Stanley Tucci) to Harold McGraw himself (John Carter).
As the suits from Time-Life and forensic experts fall under Irving’s spell, the writer himself holes up in his studio making tape recordings of “interviews” with Hughes. The money being offered him is more than he’s made from all of his novels combined, yet ironically it’s for something no less imaginative.
However brilliant his scheme, Irving continually struggles to maintain the ruse. But he’s a gourmet of lies — each one richer than the last served — and all of Manhattan is eager to dine on them. Irving’s downfall will only come when he begins to forget where reality stops and his ingenious scam begins.
Yet it’s the consensus trance that everyone else falls into that makes The Hoax worth watching. The determined refusal to face the truth by people who should know better, and their willful deafness to every alarm, is uncomfortable to witness — especialy since we have all recently seen groups that, under their sophisticated veneer, hide rubes easily swayed by barkers’ patter.
For such oversize personalities, The Hoax has a nice quietness to it. The performances are all strong, especially Davis’ Andrea Tate and Molina’s Dick Suskind, a man drenched in the flopsweat of a poor liar who nonetheless passes all publishing house inspections.
Gere is at his best here. It’s often forgotten what a fine actor he is, which is primarily his own fault for making so many dire films. But, as his beefcake charms ebb, Gere will be free to choose projects that will offer him space to hone his craft. Here, especially hunched over a tape recorder channeling the Great Plains’ nasal drone of Hughes, Gere is terrific.
The film itself is a sexed-up fabrication with a telescoped timeline (Capote’s famous Black and White Ball was nowhere near the film’s events). Irving himself has complained about Hallström’s liberties: “I had nothing to do with the movie, and it had very little to do with me.” Ah, karma.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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