The Hoax Movie
Storyline
TAGLINES
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Based on the true story. Would we lie to you?
Early in 1971, McGraw-Hill passes on Clifford Irving's new novel. He's desperate for money, so, against the backdrop of Nixon's reelection calculations, Irving claims he has Howard Hughes's cooperation to write Hughes's autobiography. With the help of friend Dick Suskind, Irving does research, lucks into a manuscript written by a long-time Hughes associate, and plays on corporate greed. He's quick-thinking and outrageously bold. Plus, he banks on Hughes's reluctance to enter the public eye. At the same time, he's trying to rebuild his marriage and deflect the allure of his one-time mistress, Nina Van Pallandt. Can he write a good book, take the money, and pull off the hoax?
| Richard Gere | Clifford Irving |
| Alfred Molina | Dick Susskind |
| Hope Davis | Andrea Tate |
| Marcia Gay Harden | Edith Irving |
| Stanley Tucci | Shelton Fisher |
| Julie Delpy | Nina Van Pallandt |
| Eli Wallach | Noah Dietrich |
| John Carter | Harold McGraw |
| Christopher Evan Welch | Albert Vanderkamp |
| Zeljko Ivanek | Ralph Graves |
| David Aaron Baker | Brad Silber |
| Peter McRobbie | George Gordon Holmes |
| John Bedford Lloyd | Frank McCullough |
| Okwui Okpokwasili | Mailka Vanderkamps |
| Stuart Margolin | Marty Ackerman |
| Lasse Hallström |
7.20 out of 10 (1059 votes)
Visitor Reviews
"Hoax" is indeed a hoax
posted on 21 Jul 2009This movie purports to tell the story of how Clifford Irving tried to sell the faked "autobiography" of billionaire, Howard Hughes - how he concocted the idea, how he extorted money from publishers, how he had his wife, Edith, cash the publisher's check, and how he was finally unmasked by Howard Hughes himself.But Hollywood is not satisfied with the plot elements furnished by history. Instead, it has produced a film that is not so much ABOUT a hoax, but IS ITSELF a hoax. Like Clifford Irving, the writers of the screenplay never let the truth stand in the way of telling the story they would like to tell: the story of "lying, corrupt, perfidious" Republicans and "virtuous, squeaky-clean" Democrats. While slyly suggesting to the audience that the film sticks close to the facts of the case, Hollywood grafts onto the saga of Irving and Hughes an elaborate fairytale about how Hughes bribed Nixon, leading to sundry conspiratorial complications too stupid to relate in detail. None of this material is true and none of it rings true. But since the film maker is more interested in playing politics than in making a movie, he is perfectly willing to sink his production under tons of extraneous, and unconvincing garbage.
Sometimes a fantasy; Gere shines as Irving in this based on truth/lies drama
posted on 11 Jul 2009THE HOAX (2007) *** Richard Gere, Alfred Molina, Hope Davis, Marcia Gay Harden, Stanley Tucci, Julie Delpy, Eli Wallach, John Carter, Christopher Evan Welch, Zeljko Ivanek. Gere gives one of his best on screen performances as Clifford Irving, the man who authored the 1970s faux biography of the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, whose lies are one step ahead of the truths haunting him and his quicksilver gift for gab only gets him deeper and deeper into trouble. A fine ensemble including Molina as Irving's aide de camp Dick Susskind, is a riot of flop-sweat and itchy tenacity at hemming the truth for his friend despite the inevitable final act of retribution served coldly. Director Lasse Hallstrom does a serviceable job of the fueled paranoia, desire for the cult of personality and the audaciousness of it all by a smart, sharply skewed screenplay adaptation by William Wheeler based on Irving's (who else?!!) novel.
appealing story
posted on 29 Jun 2009The plot is inspired by true events and is definitely interesting due to its telling about one of the most famous media scams in history. Richard Gere stars as Clifford Irving and is supported by other valuable actors, such as Alfred Molina and Hope Davis; the film is not exceptional and deliberately jarring but facts it is based upon are relevant and add details to Howard Hughes life - we knew about watching another first-rate flick, "The Aviator". I think "The Hoax" is quite exciting because these events were funny but exceptional - no bogus interview had been so much advertised - and also for its showing Gere stepping away from his usual roles.
more liberal clap trap ....
posted on 25 Jun 2009This movie is remarkable in a number of different ways. After perusing Irving's website and finding his comments about a corrupt nixon administration and similar insinuations about a bush administrations a bit ironic, I searched further to find any historical record tying Irving to Hughes to Nixon.... I came up fairly empty handed. One would think if this linkage had any credibility, there would be more information than what can be found on Irving's own website.In short, I detest the people who made this seemingly real, "based on a true story" movie and their tactics. And I pity the people who have bought into its message and the self-rigtheousness of a committed felon in Irving.I enjoyed the movie though, it further validates my utter contempt for these people. Irving condemns bush for his corruption ... Now that is comedy gold.
Semi entertaining telling of one of the greatest scam of the 20th Century.
posted on 11 Jun 2009"The Hoax" is based on Clifford Irving's book of the same name. It is about Mr. Irving's attempt to ghost write and sell the biography of eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes. At the time it cause a sensation, to finally read the own words of one of the richest and most fiercely private person in the world only to find out it was a gigantic fraud played on the public, the media and the literary world. The movie skillfully shows us a fanciful tale of rather unique individuals who partake or are victims of one of the most daring fraudulent acts.The movie begins with Clifford Irving (Richard Gere) trying to sell his latest book to his publisher, but his publisher is less than thrilled with the product. Irving, whose literary star is dimming would eventually come up with the idea of ghost writing the autobiography of Howard Hughes. He recruits his wife (Marcia Gay Harden) and his best friend (Alfred Molina) on his wild plan. Although there is some resistance for the plan, mostly from the best friend, they soon are on their way. We see how they used questionable tactics to get information that would at least give the book an air of authenticity. Mostly what we see is Irving pulling a great con job on his publisher as well as seeing Irving losing himself in his subject. The movie is well crafted and there is high quality in the production. Director Lasse Halstrom did himself proud. He moved the story along at a good pace never plodding along. His camera movement is certainly crisp and precise, I love how when Gere is driving we see how the camera follows the car from an overhead shot. Mr. Hallstrom certainly know how and when to use zoom in shots and tight close up. Truly a man who knows his way with the camera. The sets and the production values of the whole movie are excellent, from the look of a big conference room to that of narrow hallways. Everything seems to have been thought out well.The acting is generally good. My main complaint is a big one, Richard Gere in the lead. I have to admit I have never been a big Richard Gere fan, I always felt that sometimes he was holding back in his performances. Here he gives one of his better performances but it's still lacking. He played Irving as a con man less as a writer. A guy who's more interested in pulling off the scam than one who's actually writing a book. I suppose that's how it was planned to begin with but I can't help wonder how a better actor would have done in the role.The screenplay for the most part is well thought out. It made the Gere character as somebody who is quick witted schemer, but at the same time it made his victim not as dullards but people who are skeptics but at the same time hopeful of publishing a once in a career book. To me the biggest flaw in the screenplay and yes the movie is when Irving starts to see his book as something that would bring down President Nixon. He sees the Nixon- Hughes connection and deduct that it would bring down the President. Although the Nixon- Hughes connection was one of the possible reason for the Watergate Affair, I seriously doubt the real Clifford Irving believe that his book would have as major an impact.Overall, it was a well made and entertaining movie with two very serious flaws, Richard Gere's casting and how the book is linked too much to Watergate.
Starts slow, then picks up ...
posted on 05 Jun 2009This movie had it's up's and downs. It starts out a bit boring, picks up, fades, picks up and then kind of trails off again. Overall, it is mostly interesting due mainly to the characters and the idea that the events are based on reality.The film is basically about a down-on-his-luck writer who pitches a lie to a major publisher he has a relationship with: he's in contact with Howard Hughes and is writing the billionaire's autobiography. It's the 1960s and one lie leads to another ... and another ... and so on.The two primary characters are well acted by Richard Gere and Alfred Molina. They reactions to the ever-increasing lie (hoax) become interesting to watch. The only problem is that the plot rolls in and out of being interesting.If the main plot-line above intrigues you, you'll probably end up liking this movie.
A character driven drama of the highest caliber
posted on 12 Apr 2009Now here's a movie almost doomed to the back pages of cinema history. Only playing at one cinema in my area and having grossed a mere 3 million in two weeks at the box office, it might just be only a matter of time before this movie fades away and is forgotten. That would be quite the shame as the Hoax is quite the movie, and a real treat for the very few people who are actually willing to give it a chance."The Hoax" is the story of Clifford Irving, a struggling author pitching ideas to the McGraw-Hill company. As his most recent novel is blasted by critics before release, a desperate Clifford promises his editors and publishers the story of the century, without having precisely figured out what that is. That is until he stumbles onto it (literally). Clifford decides to con the whole world into believing that the reclusive enigmatic billionaire Howard Hughes has commissioned him to write his autobiography.What follows is an intriguing and enthralling romp through the mazes of lies and deceptions that Clifford and is "co-author" Dick Suskind have spun. Eventually, the fictitious story snowballs past anything the two writers could believe as revelations into accounts of fraud and blackmail begin to penetrate the highest offices, and it all begins to come crashing down."The Hoax" is a character driven drama of the highest caliber. The sharp direction and writing, and excellent casting make it hard to ignore. Richard Gere and Alfred Molina give career high performances, and the supporting Hope Davis and Marcia Gay Hayden just round the film off nicely.This is one of the best movies of 2007 so far. It may not have as wide an appeal as other outings, but it's thoroughly enjoyable all the same.4.5/5
Fascinating (though inaccurate) story
posted on 08 Apr 2009I'm old enough to remember the media frenzy that surrounded Clifford Irving's bogus autobiography of Howard Hughes. This film captures the atmosphere of that fascinating story very well. As absurd as Irving's story was, people wanted to believe it.Lasse Hallström's account of the hoax is engrossing, but fanciful; Irving has repudiated the film for its inaccuracies and distortions, and has aptly described it as a hoax about a hoax. Some incidents are exaggerated (Irving and Dick Suskind did not have to resort to a silly charade in order to photocopy Noah Dietrich's manuscript), and others are simply invented (Irving did not receive a mysterious box of Hughes files in the mail). But somehow this all works; the film is a meditation on deception, and vividly shows how lies often conceal more lies and why people are so eager to deceive themselves and others.
H for Hoax
posted on 17 Mar 2009Would you buy the autobiography of Howard Hughes from a man who wrote a book about art fraud and whose novel you'd just rejected as a pale imitation of another author's work? You would if you were McGraw-Hill and you were almost as afraid of looking stupid if it turns out to be real and you rejected it than if it turns out to be a fake you handed out a million dollar advance for. It's a pitch so ridiculous it could only be a true story, though quite how true the sadly overlooked The Hoax is is open to question since it's based on the how-I-nearly-got-away-with-it book by the fraud in question, Clifford Irving, who in turns claims he was defrauded by the filmmakers who turned his book into pure fiction...The real Irving can be seen in Orson Welles F For Fake, where he goes from expert on art frauds to a literary fraud himself in the course of the film, but while Welles doesn't figure in Lasse Hallström's film it does share some of the devious sense of fun the semi-documentary displayed. The mechanics of the fraud - looking up Hughes' Senate testimony for syntax and speech patterns, photocopying a Hughes' aide's manuscript for insider gossip - are detailed as an exhilarating adrenaline rush, the film perfectly capturing the intoxicating thrill that comes with thinking you're getting away with an outrageous scam and the crash into paranoia as you defend the indefensible so much that the only person you end up fooling is yourself. It also delights in the constant Alice in Wonderland logic of it all: as Richard Gere's Irving explains to Alfred Molina as his researcher and 'co-author' Richard Susskind, "(Hughes will) never come out of hiding long enough to denounce me because he's a lunatic hermit and I am the spokesman for the lunatic hermit, so the more outrageous I sound, the more convincing I am!" Too convincing, because Irving gradually starts becoming Hughes as he dictates the millionaire's 'memoirs' in the millionaires clothes and pencil moustache until he starts believing his own lies and manages to convince himself that maybe Hughes really is collaborating on the book in his own way to further his own political ends. Just to add to the absurdity, when Hughes does indeed break cover to denounce the book, the experts think the recluse is so contradictory that no-one initially believes his denials! There are occasional missteps - it's hard to believe that Irving's lover would describe herself to him as shallow and the film does threaten to overreach itself as it outlines a possible conspiracy with Hughes using the controversy to gain leverage with Nixon, inadvertently precipitating Watergate, but by this point it's possible that everything we see is just a fantasy fuelled by Irving's hubris and overactive imagination. Even a couple of truly terrible bits of back projection, one intentional, one not, seem entirely acceptable in context. Boasting a boxer's nose and an air of self-righteous hunger, Gere gives his best performance since Internal Affairs, while Molina and Stanley Tucci offer very different but complimentary comic performances (the one driven by sweaty desperation, the other by callous arrogance) and Hallström's direction is better than anything he's done in years (there's a particularly great shot late in the film at the moment of Irving's triumph of Hughes' suddenly malignant photo over his shoulder practically willing him on to his self-destruction).So, is the last third a hoax? Is the whole film? With a delightful lack of irony, Irving has publicly criticized the film, claiming it completely distorts events by making him look dumb and is a complex hoax that trivializes his achievement. And who are we to doubt him?
A good film, but really only for older folks that can appreciate good story-telling.
posted on 05 Mar 2009He was despicable, but everyone, EVERYONE fell for it! Everyone was so desperate to read something about this obscenely rich recluse, that people were willing to believe anything. That was the point of the movie that many didn't get. He wasn't supposed to be a sympathetic character, what started out as sort of a joke turned him into an awful person. Just look at his comments about this film, he said it wasn't at all accurate, and was upset that he was given a credit. I very much doubt anyone under 30 would like anything about this film. I think those that remember this happening when they were alive would have been even more interested. I wasn't alive, but I also enjoy when those supposedly in the know get duped. I can totally understand why certain people wouldn't enjoy this film. It could have been cut by probably about 10-15 minutes to make it a little tighter. I know that if I were to have seen this when I was in my early 20's, I wouldn't have liked it. But overall I thought it was excellently done for the most part. The acting was superb, as was the cast, the direction was good, but the script was a little off. The overall film was pretty solid for the most part.
Lying does a writer good
posted on 19 Feb 2009Richard Gere, plays Clifford Irving, a writer whose latest book is trashed. He needs to come up with another idea to sell. His idea is to write an authorized biography of billionaire Howard Hughes. He sells it by telling the higher ups that the book will be authorized by Hughes himself and that he will get exclusive interviews and insight. Only problem is Irving has never even met Hughes. He along with a partner and his wife help him cash Hughes check and come up with inside knowledge. He meets one of Hughes friends and copies a manuscript that guy had written about Hughes. He says Hughes will only communicate through letters. Irving's lie eventually gets revealed.Based on the plot, you can tell there isn't a lot of action or drama. It's OK for what it is.FINAL VERDICT: I'm sure plenty will find this movie too boring. It was a little long, but the plot did make sense and it wasn't confusing. Fans of Gere should like this.
Eye is for Inadequate
posted on 08 Jan 2009Some films are cursed in their birth. It will be so for you and this. That is, if you know Scorsese's best ("The Aviator"), Orson Welles' last ("F is for Fake"), and anything about the relationship between Hughes and Nixon.Welles' film if you don't know it was an amazing hoax, conflating Hughes and Citizen Kane, Irving (who wrote the original script) and Welles, the hoax described here with the hoax of Irving's previous book on fake paintings, Welles' mistress and Picasso's lover. Its a wonderful play on the shifts between illusion and life, far more clever if not more powerful than Herzog at his best. Scorsese is celebrated for a lot, but not much that interests me. "The Aviator" did because he changed his storytelling style to be less about personalities than forces and urges, less about love and power and more about primitive urges, less about so-called ordinary life and more about movie life.Hughes was a giant. Bill Gates is merely a thug in the robber baron mold, but Hughes was an engineer, a real engineer. It was his vision that was the major force in retooling the US military around high tech rather than manufacturing power and nukes. It was his influence that shaped at least two significant presidencies, and created the technology for the intelligence backbone now known as several agencies but in his day was the NSA. He also laid the groundwork for graft in one political party which is just now being uncovered at the scale it worked. He was big, a big man. Crazy too. My own theory of this is that he suffered what Nash did, breaking of his mind by deliberate stretching.As far as I can tell, the Irving hoax was fabricated without any secret files provided by Hughes. That business about receiving files was inspired by a separate episode that Irving had nothing to do with nor claimed so. It seems, there WERE files stolen implicating to Nixon and so on to Watergate. The insertion of this bit into the record is a sort of double hoax.Irving has come clean about the hoax and all its history. He was not involved in this film; other hoaxers were.I watched it because the real story is so big, I figured even the drudge Hallstrom couldn't mess it up. There's a little merging of life and fantasy at the end, but it is the weak kind, the kind fumbled about with in the recent "Hollywoodland." I have no complaints about Gere, its the director's fault that he chose to make it about the supposedly interesting foibles of a huckster than the motions of forces of the times. Oddly, the one thing that does work is the sound track, taken from songs of the era. Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
Big Joke
posted on 27 Dec 2008The received wisdom is that if you lie, you must stick as closely to the truth as practical, in order to make the lie believable. That, basically, is what Clifford Irving did with his fabricated "autobiography" of Howard Hughes, the secretive and eccentric billionaire. The problem is that everyone is already familiar with that dictum. If a man spends an evening with another woman, he's not likely to tell his wife that he was busy giving a speech at the Junior Chamber of Commerce. The alternative to the received wisdom is The Big Lie, the lie so huge, so outrageous, that others believe it because no one but a madman would make it up. That's what Hitler accused the Jews of doing, and Goebbels the English. Or, in the anonymous words of the Wikipedia essayist: "The Big Lie is a propaganda technique. It was defined by Adolf Hitler in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf as a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously".If Irving and his co-conspirators built a near-replicant of Hughes' real life, they surrounded it with fantasies so rich that nobody could possibly doubt them. Would a fraud claim that Hughes was about to land his helicopter atop a New York building for a meeting with McGraw-Hill -- on the condition that the top two floors of the building be cleared, the floors scrubbed and waxed, and black non-dust-collecting material be draped across all the windows? It must be common knowledge by now that Irving did a great deal of research on Howard Hughes -- right down to imitating his voice on tape in order to get Hughes' grammatical errors and idiosyncratic expressions just right -- and tried to sell the result to McGraw-Hill for five million dollars or more. The hoax was exposed when a reluctant Hughes finally agreed to a public conference call in which he denied the whole business. Irving spent some time in the slams but nobody was very badly hurt.The movie is based on Clifford Irving's book, "The Hoax." In other words, a quarter of a century later, Irving is still making money off his little adventure. Following Irving, the movie tells us that it all started off as a prank, a big joke that gradually got bigger. Poor Irving. He became a neural shambles trying to keep the enterprise together, what with betrayals by friends, threats from outside sources, traps set for him by Hughes and the President of the United States himself, the increased stress on his marriage.According to this fable, the wretched Irving is almost driven mad by his responsibility -- to others, that is. He never thinks of himself. He worries about his family. He worries about his friend's marriage. He receives a mysterious package full of secret data about Hughes, including a damning connection between Hughes and Nixon that could bring down Nixon's administration. Thereafter, Irving devotes himself to what he now sees as the pursuit of truth and justice. That is, he owes it to the American public that his fraudulent book be published because it may contain nuggets of truth.Does anyone believe this unspeakable crap anymore? Irving was a smooth-talking, ambitious con man and self promoter who had a toothsome blond girl friend, who soaked up the publicity during appearances on TV talk shows, and who eagerly anticipated the millions of dollars that were to be bilked from a respectable publisher, a rich but private citizen, and the millions of ordinary readers who would have bought his fake book. He was undeterred by his exposure as a fraud. In later interviews he would immediately switch the topic of conversation to the tribulations that he and his family had been put through, especially his poor little kiddies with tears in their eyes while daddy was in jail. And he's STILL at it with his book now having been made into a movie starring Richard Gere.The screenplay treats the story with the shabbiness it deserves. Hand-held cameras wobble during scenes of activity. Impossible fantasies of Irving being kidnapped at night, beaten senseless, and thrown out of hotel windows by agents of Howard Hughes prompt our sympathy. (It never happened, and the movie tries to explain it as a drunken fantasy so convincing that Irving believed it had happened. I ask you, the honest reader, the experienced drunk -- when is the last time you were so bombed that you woke up the next morning thinking you'd really been spirited away to Nassau, beaten by Howard Hughes, thrown into a pool, then flown back home?) Actually, one of Hughes' agents shows up from time to time as a hallucinated figure with which Irving has extensive and informative exchanges. The hallucination isn't entirely without sympathy for Irving, but generally practical and suitably distant. I got a little tired of these realistic hallucinations during "A Brilliant Mind." I didn't mind them too much when Willie Loman talked with them because, back in the late 1940s, they had a touch of originality. Here, they're just cheap expository tricks.The whole movie is like that -- cheap and self serving. The Big Joke conflated with The Big Lie. It stinks.
"Hoax" is a winner
posted on 01 Dec 2008Lasse Hallstrom has directed a compelling recreation of Clifford Irivng's novel in "Hoax". It is a retelling of the risky writing of the fake autobiography of Howard Hughes, the eccentric billionaire from Texas. Richard Gere gives a satisfying performance in his torn character of Clifford Irving himself. He is also convincing in his ability to show his simultaneous success and guiltless feelings in writing his so-called autobiography. Alfred Molina gives an emotional performance as Dick Suskind, Irving's loyal friend and co-writer. Marcia Gay Harden is a genuine Edith Irving in this disturbing story. And Julie Delpy is exquisite as Nina Van Pallandt, the paramour that Irving drags into his ploy. It makes for a nice cinema, and likely a good read.
Good movie, but...
posted on 25 Nov 2008The movie is good, entertaining and enjoyable. Richard Gere and Alfred Molina did a great job. The problem is that you are watching a supposedly real story, tied to the very history of the country and there is a major flaw related to the Nixon administration. The real Irving himself denies some other minor facts portrayed in the movie that don't affect "the big picture", maybe just the surroundings and didn't matter to me, but the story is tainted by one single fact that Irving refutes. That single fact was what, at the end of the movie, left me thinking "did this really happened?". So I did some research only to find that that single fact was made up in the movie. Since that fact is critical, I felt quite disappointed. That's why I "downgraded" the movie to a 6. Other than that, it's still worth to see how Irving was able to achieve such a hoax, since most of the other important facts are still true.
Ramifications of a Hoax
posted on 21 Nov 2008Clifford Irving (Fake, Trial, Final Argument, The Spring) became a sort of national hero when he contrived to publish 'The Autobiography of Howard Hughes', a 400 page phony but well researched book that, while it was never published, did cause enough of a stir among the New York publishing cognoscenti and those surrounding the then President Richard Nixon that it now is recognized as a HOAX of writing that triggered the final discovery of the Watergate Scandal and the subsequent dethroning of Nixon. Those facts alone make this sometimes rather tepid film interesting enough to sit through. Screenwriter William Wheeler has adapted Irving's book into a study of the 1970s and Lasse Hallström gives it just the right balance between soft crime and strange comedy to keep it afloat.Clifford Irving (Richard Gere) is down on his literary luck, searching for the right kind of story that will set is publisher Andrea Tate (Hope Davis) on fire. Irving wife Edith (Marcia Gay Harden) is an active painter and doesn't give Irving the support he gets from his pal Dick Suskind (Alfred Molina), but on the messy floor of Edith's studio is a rag magazine with a cover picture of the mysterious Howard Hughes and bingo! up comes the idea for an 'autobiography' of the wizard as confided to Irving and researched by Suskind. That is really the plot then, how these two men squirm around lies and good luck to forge papers and gain the favor of the publishers. Of course it all caves in, but in the publicity about the book Nixon's secrets are revealed and the rest is history.Gere, Molina, Harden, Davis, Stanley Tucci, Julie Delphy and Eli Wallach add immeasurably to the success of the film. No, it is not a heavy story, but the scandalous years of the 1970s are treated realistically and provide a lot of memories, both good and bad, about how we all changed in that post Vietnam time. Worth watching for that! Grady Harp
Hallström's best American movie
posted on 11 Nov 2008He's been overestimated by Hollywood, but for some reason star actors have liked to appear in his movies. This time it's for good reasons and this is by far the best script Hallström has filmed.It's in fact one of Richard Gere's best performances about this writer, who once tried to fool his publisher, Life Magazine and the rest of the world about this fake Howard Hughes autobiography. You can surely understand it, while watching Gere put his charm on, but it goes deeper than that. In the end there are tragic bottoms and truly convincing ones.Alfred Molina as the buddy is even better than Gere. What will be remembered here is a story of friendship, most of all.
Gripping film and difficult to find fault with
posted on 20 Oct 2008I really enjoyed this film from beginning to end and generally I'm difficult to please. I'm a little older than the average audience and so I knew this story really well having watched it unfold at the time. I also remember watching Orson Welles' masterpiece 'F for Fake', based around the same subject and anyone who's seen 'The Hoax' should watch 'F for Fake'. Richard Gere, and in fact, all the cast, were at their best and delivered a great script with all the tension and dynamics it needed. Gere and Molina worked very well together and I'd say it was probably Molina's best performance to date. Beautifully shot and cut, it was pacy but not too pacy like many current films. I liked the few library shots to help with creating a feeling for the period and of course, the music helped with that too. The story was told well, although if you weren't quite familiar with the outline of what happened, there could be some moments of doubt. However, knowing the story well made it all the more enjoyable.
Decent Gere Flick.
posted on 28 Sep 2008I'm not a big Richard Gere fan, I find his acting to be very bland. I didn't like him in Primal Fear, or more recently I'm Not There. Although, I must say two films I've seen recently I enjoyed him in, The Hunting Party and The Hoax. The Hoax tells the story of Clifford Irving, who wrote an autobiography on Howard Hughes, the only problem was that it was all a lie. The film is entertaining and Gere does a good job with his performance, I did not find him annoying once. Even if the film takes liberties with the actual story, it's still something to watch.Whether or not you think Irving is clever for what he did is irrelevant, the way he did it and how it is revealed in the film is what entangles you. Every time you think he is caught, he manages to squirm away free and continue his web of lies. It's almost thrilling...almost.The story goes a tad bit on the weird side when he starts seeing imaginary figures, like A Beautiful Mind. They seem out of place for a story like this and doesn't flow very well with the rest of the film. Alfred Molina co-stars as the partner in crime and he plays up the nerves, while Marcia Gay Harden is Gere's wife, who also takes a part in the scheme of things. Hope Davis and Julie Deeply round out the supporting cast, with Deeply given very little to do.I did enjoy the film and it was interesting enough for me to actually look up the events up what really transpired. With every film that is 'Based On True Events' liberties are taken and this one is no different. Playing up more parts and adding in their own little stories to make things seem more interesting and flow better. The Hoax winds up being one of Gere's better films.
A Solid film with Solid A+ Performances. Alfred Molina and Gere Need Oscar Recognition!
posted on 16 Aug 2009Well HOAX is one of the better movie of 2007 so far. The story is Interesting and Gripping…… which I guess means the movie itself could be a HOAX. Well the movie was suspenseful, very well written, very well flowing…PARANOIC and Confusing too. I was confused by the ending. You Know like WHO KNOWS?Richard Gere Gives a VERY SOLID performance. So far he stands among the GOT-TO-Be Nomianted list for this year. He portrays the character with such great devotion that you forget it's Richard Gere. OH I sound like as if he was SOOO GOOD! Well HE IS Indeed!Alnong side him is Alfred Molina portraying Dick who is Clifford's sidekick. Well HE is SO GOOD in his role that I think the chances of him getting nominated in this years Oscars is Very likely. He is TRULY SENSATIONAL. Funny, sad, Confused and irritating too. Trust me on this, He is REALLY GOOD!Stankly Tucci, Hope Davis and Marcia Gay Harden also Shine in there short Performances.All in all, it's a well Directed movie….Superbly Performed by the Actors.And the story is maybe hinting something in the END. and I too found myself being paranoiac just like the character. And that My Friend is a Great Achievement.Truly A solid Movie. 9/10 Root for Molina and Gere for the Oscars!