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THE HOAX
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By now we have been so Oliver-Stoned by based-on-a-true-story phantasms that when the ads for THE HOAX gleefully added would we lie to you?, we now what we're in for.
At age 39, multi-married Clifford Irving (Richard Gere, Looking for Mr. Goodbar), once a contemporary of greatness, is now a so-five-minutes-ago washed-up author whose editor Andrea Tate (the versatile Hope Davis, The Secret Life of Dentists), despairs of making him understand that declining advances represent his upside. Irving, who fancies himself a swinger and has the burnt-orange turtlenecks to prove it, is damned if he'll go quietly into that remainder-bin good night. If his fiction will not sell, then he will give them 1970's biggest, juiciest non-fiction – the autobiography of Howard Hughes, told as only Clifford Irving could sell it. Aided by his cringing best friend, Dick Suskind (Alfred Molina, Spiderman 2), he sets off, fueled by a $100,000 advance, to scrounge, steal, finagle, surreptitiously copy the unpublishable illiterate memoirs of a Hughes crony (Eli Wallach, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly), or filch, any details about Howard Hughes' life. As for the present? Contrary to the dogma of supposedly skeptical editors, you can make this stuff up and as Irving says, the more unbelievable it is, says one, the more they'll believe it.
As Irving tries to invent Hughes, he finds himself, in the strangest Stockholm Syndrome imaginable, discovering Hughes. Ingeniously unearthing an audiotape of Hughes explaining his theory of business leads to Irving absorbing not just Hughes' mannerisms and vocal cadences but his way of thinking. "In every encounter, one party takes control by becoming the lion!" and when the publisher demands draft chapters from Octavio (their code name for the reclusive billionaire), Irving tells them Howard is canceling the contract.
Gere, whose best roles have always involved self-mocking flim-flam men (Breathless, American Gigolo, Primal Fear, Chicago), is wonderful here, diving head-first and with utter believability into the character of a con man who can only raise his previous bluffs, up and up. Along the way, he rekindles an old affair with socialite Nina van Pallandt (Julie Delpy, Before Sunrise), who when the house of cards tumbles parlays her fifteen seconds of fame ("I? I'm an actress … and a singer") into a movie where she played opposite … Richard Gere (American Gigolo).
Thus does trash imitate trash – and if you feel foolish and used after it's over, you join a long line of those Clifford Irving charmed, bamboozled, duped … and entertained.