The Hoax.

"It's bracing to see a grand con-man comedy like The Hoax, in which our moral universe is affirmed, and yet the fabled trickster Clifford Irving - who wrote a fraudulent autobiography of Howard Hughes - is so darn likable," writes David Edelstein in New York. "It helps that Irving is played by Richard Gere, a much-underrated actor who learned, as the villain of Internal Affairs, to harness his Methody contortions and underplay slyly. Now he gives out emotion in tiny beams; he's a glimmer man."

Newsweek's David Ansen: "The movie does a wonderful job capturing the volatile early 70s, when Vietnam War protests and anti-establishment fervor fed Irving's chutzpah - he could tell himself he was putting one over on The System. But The Hoax also resonates in our current media and political climate, where 'truthiness' passes itself off as truth.... The Hoax is the freshest, most surprising American movie so far in 2007."

Updated through 4/7.

"So sure is [director Lasse] Hallström's pacing that you barely notice the withering moral of the tale: when the money is big enough, everyone is a mug," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker.

In the Los Angeles Times, Paul Cullum talks with Gere about preparing for the role.

Online listening tip. Alfred Molina is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Update: New York, 1970, 1971. Why aren't the twin towers under construction at the World Trade Center? In The Hoax, that is. ST VanAirsdale asks Hallström.

Updates, 4/4: "To its credit, The Hoax isn't glib - it doesn't chalk up Irving's moral vacuum to anything a bad mommy or daddy did," writes Ella Taylor. "But there's no other point of view either; the film suffers a fatal equivocation over whether to frame him as a prankster or an American tragedy. Watching The Hoax, I kept hankering for the antic joie de vivre of Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, which gave itself wholly over to what we love about the con men who dare to slough off the daily grind and do it their way." Also in the Voice: Scott Foundas talks with Irving: "I think Richard Gere is terrific in it, even though the character that he plays is not me. If I was that guy, I'd shoot myself, because that guy is desperate."

"It's the charlatan version of A Beautiful Mind, and in the end Hallström, like Ron Howard, tames a mind-boggling subject into an engaging, mediocre movie," writes Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix. "Now if Hallström had only directed The Aviator and Scorsese had done The Hoax..."

Online listening tip. Gere on Fresh Air.

Updates, 4/5: "Hallström's film fits into several easily identifiable current sub-genres, including the boomer public-history/nostalgia saga, the investigation of media malfeasance and corruptibility drama, the truth vs fiction and artist vs impostor brain-teaser, and so on," notes Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly. "In fact, if you put all those elements into a blender and mixed them into a silky-smooth cocktail, it would inevitably have the blandness of the over-familiar. No doubt sensing that, the makers of The Hoax have compensated by trying to make their movie entertaining as hell. But the big problem there is that the more 'entertaining' the movie becomes - fast, flashy, breathlessly contrived - the less interesting it is."

Vue Weekly's Josef Braun finds the film "not as seductive as I imagine Irving must have been."

But Shaun Brady recommends the film to Philadelphia City Paper readers.

And then there's Armond White: "The exploitation of easy political bias shows the kind of pop instinct that makes Hallström despicable."

"It's a plot fit for an evil genius, and Hallström's rapid-fire depiction of Irving's initial scheming is light and nimble. What truly makes the early going such a blast, however, is an overriding sense of unembarrassed, impressed appreciation, with the director as charmed by Irving as were the Houghton Mifflin and Life Magazine suits," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "The Hoax ultimately wants Gere's swindler to stand for something momentous, for something larger than himself, but in the process, it fails to recognize that what made this con man so fascinating was the astonishing, lunatic singularity of his ambition."

Updates, 4/6: Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader, writing in the Chicago Reader, finds The Hoax to be "a quintessential mainstream doorstop deceptively marketed as an art movie... Essentially the same story is recounted, far more accurately as well as meaningfully, in Orson Welles's F for Fake (1974), where it delivers a radical lesson about both the speciousness of punditry and media expertise and the complicity of the audience in most hoaxes. The cynical postmodernist lessons of The Hoax are quite different: that shallow media types (as opposed to clear, no-bullshit thinkers like the rest of us) are dying to be fooled, that all of us are hustlers, and that none of us really knows the truth anyway."

"Like Zodiac, another true story set in roughly the same period, The Hoax gestures beyond the particulars of its case toward a pervasive social unease, a sense of ambient danger and disorder that has no clear source or antidote," writes AO Scott in the New York Times.

"[T]he scam had to be a hell of a lot of fun to pull off. The Hoax lets you in on that fun, scot-free," writes Bradley Steinbacher in the Stranger.

A "substantial piece," submits the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle. "The Hoax becomes the story of a fascinating person who accepted the world's challenge and decided to fight it on its own terms. The world valued flash, bluff and celebrity, and that's what he gave it."

It's is "an entertaining botch of a movie," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "[W]hen The Hoax devolves into a moral, cautionary tale, it becomes a lot less fun."

Updates, 4/7: "[A]ny movie that recreated, with some semblance of faithfulness, the incredible events of 1970-72 would inherently crackle," writes Justin Stewart at Reverse Shot. "Unfortunately, we've been given just that—a safe, comfortable any-movie, content to simply nail the period fashion, juggle a little allegory, and call it a 'film version.' When the movie does depart from its origins, the results are either farcical misfiring or butterfingered moral downward spiraling. So while it's never exactly unpalatable, it's also instantly forgettable."

Michelle Orange at the Reeler: "Hallström's determination to keep Irving likable makes it seem more likely that the guy can't help it: he's just a pathological squirrel, trying to get a nut. In a late, awful scene with his wife, Irving can't tell the truth even when he tries; anyone who has known this type of fabulist will recoil with recognition. The idea of what is and isn't plausible gets a lot of chiding play in The Hoax, and it's one that could have used more consideration in the formulation of its swell-talking centerpiece."

Jonathan Rosenbaum hears from Mark Rappaport that the suggestion that Irving's hoax might have led to the Watergate break-in is not all that far-fetched.

Posted by dwhudson at April 2, 2007 8:17 AM