F is for fake: Clifford Irving (Richard Gere) gets into trouble for writing a bogus autobiography of Howard Hughes in Lasse Hallström's The Hoax. (Alliance Atlantis)
One day in 1970, a wiry, skittish author named Clifford Irving (Richard Gere) sprinted into his publisher’s office and announced: “I’m working on the most important book of the 20th century!” Pitching the foolproof bestseller is the fantasy of every writer who has ever felt rejected, foiled, under-appreciated and under-published, which is pretty much all writers. Irving proposed that he would deliver the first authorized autobiography of the shut-in billionaire germaphobe Howard Hughes, and the McGraw-Hill publishing house would pay $1 million for the book. The surprise ending? It was all a lie, a scam that makes James Frey look like a harmless front porch yarn spinner.
The Hoax is loosely based on Irving’s 1981 memoir about his attempt to perpetrate one of the biggest frauds in publishing history: Irving didn’t know Hughes and Hughes didn’t know Irving. In fact, no one knew Irving; by the early '70s, fame as an author had proven elusive to him, and he was best known for Fake!, a critically acclaimed flop about — presciently — the art forger Elmyr de Hory. After he has a new novel summarily rejected by his editors, Irving blurts out the fantastic faux-pitch on a whim (the real Irving, now 77, claims he was far more successful than the film allows, a fascinatingly defensive posture that suggests his scam artist’s ego is still robust). The wonderful Alfred Molina plays Dick Suskind, Irving’s co-author and co-conspirator, an uncertain soul, devoted and greedy and sweating like an ice sculpture at a July wedding. Irving, a pill-popping, over-spending charmer, engenders support for his lie with little effort, easily enlisting his neglected Swiss-German wife (Marcia Gay Harden) to abuse her national banking system.
As played by Gere – lit with jumpy energy, his handsome quotient depleted by a prosthetic bridge on his nose – Irving is an entitled narcissist, but not without conscience. He cheats on his wife (with the resplendent Julie Delpy) and betrays his haughty agent (Hope Davis, who swings instead of walks in bell-shaped mini-dresses), but he knows he’s doing wrong; he suppresses his better self defiantly and sheepishly, like an endearing addict. What he is is a writer, and when a writer’s got a story to tell, truth be damned, Oprah.
The bittersweet surprise is that Irving turns out to be talented after all. He can inhabit the heads of others, a gift that comes to life in scenes where he “interviews” Hughes by tape recording himself in character as the legendary recluse. Irving channels his imagined version of Hughes, nailing the intonation and the aphorisms, even penciling a small Hughes-ian moustache above his lip; it’s an original, literal manifestation of the writing process. Irving starts to merge with Hughes, whose own code of ethics was somewhat slippery. The resulting Autobiography of Howard Hughes is as unreliable as Hughes ever was, but it’s convincing, too: the book is deemed “a masterpiece,” by one higher-up at McGraw-Hill. The look on Irving’s face when he hears the m-word is clear: it’s all worth it.
The sharp script by William Wheeler moves toward a larger conspiracy theory involving Hughes’s relationship to Nixon — another trickster — and when Hughes emerges from seclusion to claim he has nothing to do with the book, the onion peels again: who’s using whom, and why?
Gently directed by Lasse Hallstrom (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Chocolat), The Hoax never offers a childhood event that tidily explains Irving’s warped psychology, and bravo for resisting. The answer to “How could this have happened?” is something elastic and ephemeral, a collision of the hubris of the author, the avarice of the publisher and the free-for-all relativism of the '70s. But as we know in these “truthy” times, there are always second acts: Irving went on to a prolific writing career and his notorious con has become a great movie. You couldn’t make that up.
The Hoax opens across Canada April 6.
Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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