The Hoax
Directed by Lasse Hallström
Euro-hack Lasse Hallström continues his practice of middlebrow art films with The Hoax, a dramatization of writer Clifford Irving faking an autobiography of legendary billionaire Howard Hughes in the early 1970s. As if close proximity to Scorsese’s wretched Hughes biopic The Aviator weren’t bad enough, Hallström pretends political significance by paralleling Irving’s dishonesty with the political machinations of President Richard Nixon. His money shot is news footage of Nixon endorsing the election of George Herbert Walker Bush (“It will be good for Texas, and I know it will be good for the United States.”) The exploitation of easy political bias shows the kind of pop instinct that makes Hallström despicable.
Shrewd to the point of cynical, Hallström flips the moral view of Irving’s chicanery (media fraud having become a celebrity rite of passage) and turns the film into one of those “secret history” shams: Thanks to Clifford Irving, a dishonest presidency was brought down. (Smug applause filled the screening room.) Not much different from the fake Americana of Hallström’s The Cider House Rules, The Hoax recreates the ’70s era with fashion and pop tunes that condescend to nostalgia and to the contemporary audience’s ignorance. The best sense of Irving’s personality and criminal jet-set ambition is found in F for Fake, Orson Welles’ extraordinary account of art forger Elmyr de Hory, role model and subject of Irving’s previous book.
Hallström is the art forger here. The Hoax neglects basic ethical considerations, substituting the same moral perversion and snark of recent biopics like Shattered Glass and Capote; its lofty conceits acted by a similar B-movie cast: Richard Gere, his hairline shaved, plays Irving with glum desperation. Alfred Molina plays his sadsack friend/researcher just like he played Joe Orton’s sadsack lover in Prick Up Your Ears. Marcia Gay Harden plays Edith Irving like her victimized wife role in Pollack. This coy costume party turns serious in scenes of Irving’s paranoid delusion—copying the bogus psychology of A Beautiful Mind.
Gaudily contrived, The Hoax shifts time and tone with a lot of wasted skill. Oliver Stapleton’s deeply saturated photography reminded me of Alain Resnais’ time-shifting Muriel, except Hallström’s fantasy montages abuse Resnais’ radical narrative experiments. (Incidentally, rare showings of Muriel begin at the Museum of Modern Art April 6.) Climaxing with Irving’s doppelganger hallucinations, The Hoax takes a light-hearted approach to crime and celebrity. Screenwriter William Wheeler’s shtick attempts a tiresome comic myth like Catch Me If You Can. Yet, Hallström’s faux art style wears you down because it is offensively heavy-handed.
