The Hoax

Who'd have thought it, hey? Lasse Hallstrom finally makes another good movie. Despite starting off with movies like 'My Life as a Dog' and 'What's Eating Gilbert Grape?', old Lasse hasn't exactly set the world on fire of late, his last half-decent flick being the slightly stodgy 'The Cider House Rules' ('Chocolat' was far too sweet for me, and I'd watch Juliette Binoche in a fast food ad). But with The Hoax' he bucks the trend. It's great fun, and intelligent too. Of course, it helps to have a fine cast (Gere, Davies, Molina, Delpy), a score by one of the US's best film composers, Carter Burwell (though this is sadly underused), and a wickedly cheeky script by William Wheeler. Based on a real life case, the movie follows down-at-heel novelist, Clifford Irving, as he attempts to write and sell Howard Hughes's 'autobiography'.
Can he possibly get away with the hoax?
Set in the seventies, Hallstrom's approach to filming that decade is more workmanlike than David Fincher's in the recent 'Zodiac'. Stock footage of protests and presidents is used in a very traditional manner (like the 80's themed 'This Is England'), but it does work. Gere has transformed into a far more interesting (and haggard) actor than his pretty boy past might have given us reason to expect. He pins down Irving's Munchausen character perfectly. Molina too adds some substance to the comic sidekick role, while Marcia Gay Harden, Hope Davies and Julie Delpy (haven't seen her in ages) make as much as they possibly can of the sidelined female parts. All in all it's an impressive show and shows the hoax to be part of the widespread culture of deception and lies that was Nixon's America. Indeed if we're to believe the film, the hoax actively fed this culture, making the fake autobiography the implicit reason for Watergate and so Nixon's downfall.
Good stuff all round.