Lasse Hallstrom’s film “The Hoax” goes a long way to prove what P.T. Barnum once said, “There is a sucker born every minute.” In 1971 an unknown, rejected writer named Clifford Irving, with lots of chutzpah and a gift of gab, came up with a scheme...
...to write a counterfeit “authorized biography” of mystery man Howard Hughes.
People were fascinated with the eccentric millionaire in the 1970s. I lived in Las Vegas at the same time Hughes did and there were constant stories about him or his agents in the two local papers. He lived on the Strip, on the entire top floor of the Desert Inn Casino, and I, like many other people in town, wondered about the strange man as I drove past the casino.
To inform the public about the reclusive Hughes, especially after it had been reported that he had gone off the deep end mentally, would have been a big deal, a profitable enterprise, and the ambitious Irving wanted to capitalize on that interest. He, a friend named David Susskind, and Irving’s wife, collaborated on the scam that has become as legendary as the fabled millionaire himself. The scam netted Irving (Richard Gere) and Susskind (Alfred Molina) a million dollars before the bubble burst. Hughes had to go public for the first time in fifteen years to put an end to the farce, putting egg on the face of McGraw-Hill, Irving’s publishers who had swallowed his story hook, line, and sinker.
To an extent, Hughes used Irving to get at Richard Nixon, who was sitting president at the time, because he had had some secret cash dealings with Nixon that he wanted exposed, which were supposed to be discussed in the fake biography. The book was run off the presses but never made it to the bookstores, only to the back lot at McGraw-Hill where they ended up in a huge bonfire.
“The Hoax” is a portrait of an amiable, clever, and resourceful con man. Irving may have been a crook and a fraud, and he served time for his shenanigans, but today he could just as easily be seen as a performance artist. Orson Welles, in his movie “F for Fake,” said, “Every true artist must, in his way, be a magician, a charlatan. Picasso once said he could paint fake Picassos as well as anybody…” Irving could not sell his own fiction - one publisher called him “third rate” - but he could become famous for the Mother of all Scams, at least in the publishing business. He had chutzpah in spades, was a facile improviser, a great actor and entertainer, and had an imagination that was lively and inexhaustible. If he couldn’t do it in fiction, he certainly could do it in performance - in real life situations. Some of the Surrealists and Dadaists of the early 20th century would have marveled at his skill at bluffing and spontaneous invention. As Mike Wallace points out in the Special Features on the DVD, you want Irving to pull the wool over the eyes of the smug publishers, to confound the so-called ‘experts.’ Your impulse is to cheer him on, to applaud his daring, his bravery and brass, his uncanny capacity to persuade and fabricate, to worm his way out of one jam after another, until the final curtain falls.
Richard Gere plunges into his role as Irving; there's a pumped-up vitality and brio to his characterization. He seems to really enjoy the nature of the role. His good chemistry with Alfred Molina is also obvious and generates a duet of some excitement. Apparently, Hallstrom was not adverse to the two actors improvising frequently; this is particularly clear in a few scenes, especially the ones where Gere is trying to imitate Howard Hughes’ voice and how his business mind works. There is a freshness and unfiltered quality to these scenes; they lift the performances to a higher level. Academy Award-winner Marcia Gay Harden does a nice turn as Irving’s long suffering spouse. Julie Delpy plays his mistress and she has never looked more beautiful and sexy. Too bad she is only employed for three short scenes.
According to David Thomson in his book "Rosebud," while discussing “F for Fake,” Orson Welles felt “ there is no higher calling than being a magician, a storyteller, a fake who passes the time.” Thomson goes on: “For it can be very hard to live with the belief that nothing matters in life, nothing is solid and real, that everything is a show in the egotist’s head…proof that the emptiness and the trickery are valid and sufficient.” So there you have it. “The Hoax” can be seen as a cautionary tale, or as a provocative celebration of one of the boldest scams of the 20th century.
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