THE HOAX

Director: Lasse Hallstrom (What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Chocalate, The Shipping News)
Starring: Richard Gere, Alfred Molina, Marcia Gay Harden, Hope Davis

The plot of the Hoax is a fairy thin story. That's why it's such a surprise that the film still manages to entertain throughout. It's not a long movie (115 minutes), but even with the short running time it doesn't feel as if much really happened. Director Lass Hallstrom is the main reason that it worked. He does a very fine job of stretching the material to fill the voids, so to speak, but the very good performances by Richard Gere and Alfred Molina should also be noted.

The Hoax is "based" (I love that term) on the real fraud that bestselling author Clifford Irving perpetrated on the publishing industry in the 1970s, where he claimed to have gotten exclusive access to the troubled, reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes to pen an autobiography. Hughes had virtually isolated himself from the world, using only a handful of middlemen to conduct his affairs of business. Irving, along with his writing partner Dick Susskind, assumed that this isolation would be what allowed their scheme to work, that Hughes would never come out of his self-imposed exile to denounce them as frauds. In the end, he did (at least by telephone - his last interview), and they did prison time.

In the film, Irving (Gere) and Susskind (Molina) are talented, but unsuccessful authors. Irving's latest novel is derided as a cheap Phillip Roth-knockoff and rejected for publication. He's desperate for cash, but wonderfully he's even more desperate for noteriety. This is what I most liked about the film, that it got this bit right on why this man took all these risks. The money is just part of the equation that makes the defrauder into a big man, a success. He's terrified of his own potential for failure, so he'll do whatever it takes to be a success. I think another recent film about a fraud, Catch Me If You Can, missed on this point. I think that Spielberg probably made a slightly better movie than The Hoax, but there's a bit less truth to it.

Anyway, back to the movie. Once the authors devise their plan, they study Hughes handwriting and make forgeries of letters for their publishers. These somehow pass the muster of handwriting analysis, and they get a huge upfront sum for the book, although most of the funds are directed to Hughes. Their solution to this problem is to have the check made out to H. Hughes, and have Irving's wife open a Swiss bank account as Helga Hughes. From the first moment that the authors create their scheme, there are many skeptics. Wonderfully there are also characters more than willing to take them at their word, as they see big sales for the book, and the potential for their own noteriety, but there are characters who doubt the validity of the autobiography. Each time a skeptic raises their head, Gere and Molina concoct a plan to squash their doubts, and the stakes of their fraud feel ratcheted up. Eventually, the hoax becomes interconnected with the Watergate scandal and the collapse of Nixon's presidency, or so Irving thinks. There is certainly some blurring of reality as the lies stack higher and higher.

As I said Lass Hallstrom deserves much of the credit for this film's success. His sense of pacing is excellent, with comedy, or despair peppered in at just the right moments to continue pulling the story along. In the end, just like the real hoax of Clifford Irving, Gere goes to jail. It's an interesting ride to that point, though. It may feel short, or thin, as a story, and I don't know how much there really is for the viewer to take away from this film, but I think it's definitely worth the 2-hour diversion from the rest of your life.

Standouts: A "well-crafted" film all around by Hallstrom, et al. Fine acting across the board.
Blowouts: The story didn't reach very high, but it defintely grabbed whatever it was reaching for.

Grade: B