Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11857 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-02-11
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 111 minutes

Synopsis
Richard Gere gives one of the best performances of his career in Lasse Hallstrom's vastly entertaining THE HOAX, based on true events. Gere stars as Clifford Irving, a struggling writer desperate to be a famous bestselling author. After his novel gets rejected, he concocts a crazy plot in which he convinces McGraw-Hill that he has been contacted by Howard Hughes in order to tell the official life story of the reclusive billionaire. With the help of his friend, nervous writer Dick Suskind (Alfred Molina), and Irving's artist wife, Edith (Marcia Gay Harden), he attempts to get away with one of the greatest literary hoaxes of the 20th century. He goes to elaborate lengths to pull the wool over the eyes of his editor, Andrea Tate (Hope Davis), as well as his publisher, Shelton Fisher (Stanley Tucci), and the managing editor of Life magazine, Ralph Graves (Zeljko Ivanek), who is offering big bucks to serialise the book. As Irving gets deeper and deeper into the lies, he begins to embody Hughes, mimicking the way he looks and talks. The film features excellent performances all around, including star turns by Eli Wallach as longtime Hughes employee Noah Dietrich (a part played by John C. Reilly in Martin Scorsese's THE AVIATOR) and Julie Delpy as Nina Van Pallandt, a former flame of Irving's whom he can't shake loose. Director Hallstrom (MY LIFE AS A DOG, CHOCOLAT, THE CIDER HOUSE RULES) shows a deft hand with the complex material; William Wheeler based the script in part on Clifford Irving's own memoir.

Customer Reviews

Better than average Gere
Not normally a big fan of Richard Gere, but this film show a return to form for him. When watching the film you're never quite sure what has been added for dramatic affect and what is part of the original true story. However, that resonates quite well with the fact that Irving himself appeared not to know the difference between fact and fiction either. Well worth a watch.

Below average stab at a genre done so much better recently.

Want to see a movie about a con artist? A really good one? Then watch Catch Me If You Can. The Hoax isn't a terrible movie, I'd give it 2.5 stars if I could, but it falls short in areas where we've seen it done so much better in recent years.

Whereas Catch Me If You Can studies a confidence man who did everything we see in the movie, although less glamourously I'm sure, The Hoax seems to take artistic license too far and leaves you thinking just that. Representing one of the most infamous literary scandals of the 20th century, it presents things that just didn't happen as if they are historical fact, something Hollywood has done a few too many times for me.

It's entertaining enough, all the performances are decent (although Gere is a bit lacklustre) and you will probably enjoy it if you're not familiar with the real story the movie is based on. If you are, avoid it.

An interesting true story translated into a quite slow 'just OK' film
This is the story of how a struggling author called Clifford Irving was so desperate for success he decided to make up a story that he was in contact with Howard Hughes who had agreed for Irving to write his life story. Shockingly, Irving's publisher's believed this, leading to a huge chain of events where this hoax snowballed out of control.

The story itself is an amazing one, especially considering as it was actually true. So I was looking forward to seeing how exactly Irving, played by an in-form Richard Gere, actually managed to pull this stunt off. The film itself portrays the key events well, showing vividly the pivotal moment where Irving suddenly takes the dramatic decision to embark on the hoax. The attention to detail and planning that went into maintaining and fueling the sham are very convincingly acted, drifting between high drama and moments of comedy as some of the lies Irving creates to deflect awkward questions get more and more outrageous.

But what lets the film down is that the plotline moves along very slowly, the film's almost 2 hours long but there's a lot of bloat and irrelevant subplots that could easily have been left out. For someone responsible for such an amazing deception you should come away at least feeling a bit of admiration for his ingenuity, or a little sorry for him, or maybe even be cheering him on. But Irving is portrayed in this film in a way that makes you not really feel anything for him, he doesn't come across as particularly likeable or humorous, he doesn't seem a very warm character, you just end up not caring if he pulls it off or not. This is a real pity as a plot as audacious as this should have a lot more emotional engagement with the viewer, you should feel almost as caught up in it as the characters, but in the end you just feel very detached from it all and quite underwhelmed.

A good film, but with a storyline as fascinating as this, it should have been a lot better.