From the Archives: The Hoax

Another dive into the pre-Talking Movies archives finds Richard Gere ghostwriting Howard Hughes’ autobiography, but as he’s actually faking it all dealing with his publishers and Hughes’ lawyers is going to require a lot more ingenuity than his usual plotlines.

“The book of the century!” is what Clifford Irving (Richard Gere) promises his publishers after they reject the manuscript of his latest novel. Sure enough once he’s had time to construct an outrageous lie, he delivers the sensational goods in the shape of the authorised memoirs of Howard Hughes, as ghosted by Irving…

Set in 1971 this comedy-drama sees Clifford and friend and fellow writer Dick Suskind (Alfred Molina) keep on digging ever deeper holes for themselves as they try to write the explosive memoirs of a man they’ve never met while simultaneously fabricating evidence that Hughes really has been spilling his life story to them to convince the lawyers to hand over outrageous amounts of money to them. This film should have been a hilarious 90 minute comedy. Its best moments belong to the hi-jinks of that grifter sub-genre, as Gere and Molina steal files from the airforce and illegally photo Senate testimony to nail Hughes’ speech patterns and business tactics. Director Lasse Hallstrom though, for some reason best known to himself, decides to attempt dark and dramatic. Gere becomes increasingly paranoid and delusional as he immerses himself in the character of Howard Hughes to write the ‘memoir’.

And that is where the wheels fall off the wagon. Lasse Hallstrom is almost the text-book example of a talented European director who goes to Hollywood and settles into a career of unremitting mediocrity. Following on from such fare as The Cider House Rules and Chocolat Hallstrom once again produces a film that is offensive by dint of its sheer blandness. There’s nothing wincingly wrong with this film, it just screams of a lost opportunity, it could have been so much better. It’s at least half an hour too long and becomes increasingly uncertain as to whether there’s meant to be any laughs at all. Richard Gere is, you guessed it, bland…as is the usually reliable Alfred Molina. Julie Delpy is incredibly irritating in a ‘sexy’ cameo as Gere’s mistress while Marcia Gay Harden’s role as his wife is weakly written and her wavering accent (I think it’s meant to be Swedish but it keeps hitting British) only adds to the sense of drift of the film. Down the credits Eli Wallach is criminally wasted, his great talent thrown away on just one scene, but at least the godlike Stanley Tucci gets to have some fun playing the arrogant chairman of McGraw-Hill publishers.

Scorsese at his worst is better than Hallstrom being bland, and the shadow of The Aviator hangs heavy over this film. Hoax seems to assume we know nothing about Howard Hughes but we’ve seen Leonardo DiCaprio (however hamfistedly) portray his descent into reclusive paranoia. Hughes, by being humanised, has become tragic. The fate of the cardboard characters in this film aren’t tragic at all, it is only the comic machinations that hold the attention, and once they’re ditched so is our interest.

2/5

For Your Consideration, Delaney

EXT.SPANISH VILLA, LOS ANGELES-DAY

LEONARDO DICAPRIO walks up the drive to the villa and rings the doorbell.

 

TITLE: LAST SATURDAY MORNING IN HOLLYWOOD…

 

While he waits he takes out his phone and scrolls down a list of names.

 

CLOSE ON: Delaney. Agent, friend of Micawber-Mycroft, likes potted plants.

 

DELANEY, an agent to the stars, opens the door, looking more confused than usual.

 

DICAPRIO: Well, good morning, Delaney.

DELANEY: Uh, hello.

DICAPRIO: (Brushing past him) Thanks for inviting me into your home.

DELANEY: I didn’t actually…

 

INT.CHEZ DELANEY-DAY

Delaney shuts the door and turns around to see DiCaprio stroking the leaves of a fern.

 

DICAPRIO: It’s nice to see someone else who appreciates the comfort a good potted plant can give to a residence.

DELANEY: Do you like potted plants too?

DICAPRIO: Absolutely. Absolutely! I knew when Christopher Nolan mentioned that you were a devotee of potted plants that you were my kind of man.

DELANEY: But, I don’t know Christopher Nolan.

DICAPRIO: Pssshh! Nolan knows Micawber-Mycroft, you know Micawber-Mycroft, and so I feel like I really know you. We men of potted plants.

DELANEY: Did Mycroft give you my address?

DICAPRIO: No, I looked it up in the Academy’s records office.

DELANEY: Are they allowed to just give out members’ addresses like that?!

DICAPRIO: Well, it’s not strictly speaking legal. (He gives Delaney a dazzling smile. A smile that understood him just as far as Delaney wanted to be understood, and believed in him as Delaney would like to believe in himself. Delaney blinks.)

DICAPRIO: I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve called on you this fine morning.

DELANEY: It had crossed my mind. It’s very early.

DICAPRIO: Early?! Good God man, it’s very nearly 9am. You’re the fourth person I’ve called on this morning. I’d like to talk to you about my Oscar.

DELANEY: You want an Oscar for The Revenant?

DICAPRIO: Yes, I do. Let’s face it. It’s time.

 

DiCaprio turns and walks into the kitchen. Delaney picks up a watering-can from the floor beside the fern, and follows him. He sets to loving work on a potted plant sitting on the kitchen island that DiCaprio is now lounging against.

 

DICAPRIO: We gardeners, we understand the virtue of patience. We understand nourishing. I’ve paid my dues. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? The Aviator. Blood Diamond. The Wolf of Wall Street. Now, like a yucca, I am finally flowering.

DELANEY: But, about The Revenant…

DICAPRIO: It was so cold, so bitterly cold, but I acted my heart out. Let me explain something of my method. When I was lighting gunpowder on my face to cauterise a wound how did I convey the appropriate amount of pain?

DELANEY: I don’t know.

DICAPRIO: I thought about how I got beaten for my subtle portrayal of intellectual diffability by Tommy Lee Jones doing his Tommy Lee Jones gruff shtick.

DELANEY: Yes, but about The Revenant…

DICAPRIO: When I dragged myself out of the shallow grave I channelled the fury and determination that I felt when, after saving Scorsese from making Nicolas Cage movies and Tibet travelogues, I didn’t win an Oscar for playing a true-life figure struggling with mental health issues.

DELANEY: See, about The Revenant…

DICAPRIO: When I had to float down through rapids in freezing water I thought about how with Blood Diamond I’d made a socially responsible film with a socially responsible director, nailed a tricky accent, and still didn’t win an Oscar. What is freezing water compared to that agony?

DELANEY: It’s just that The Revenant…

DICAPRIO: When I had to eat raw bison liver I just howled inwardly, thinking if I act like an actual wolf maybe they might regret snubbing me as The Wolf of Wall Street.

DELANEY: Mycroft thinks The Revenant is a Discovery special, not high art!

 

DiCaprio stares at Delaney. Delaney looks at the floor. DiCaprio sighs.

 

DICAPRIO: Look, I didn’t want to bring it up. But, for The Revenant’s big scene I, I… Well look, I’ll just come straight out and say it. I was… ((leans forward to Delaney’s ear, whispers inaudibly).

DELANEY: (recoils in horror) NO!!!! NO!! Really?!

DICAPRIO: Yes, for the sake of art. Whatever it takes to get the Oscar, Delaney, whatever it takes.

DELANEY: Well that changes everything. I’ll have to call Janine right now.

DICAPRIO: Who?

DELANEY: My secretary. She handles all my paperwork.

DICAPRIO: Oh. Well, you call right away. I’ll just sit here. (Smiles at him again.)

DELANEY: (fumbles with his phone) Janine! (beat) Yes, I know today is Saturday, but Leonardo DiCaprio is in my villa. (beat) Really! (beat) He’s doing the Gatsby smile, Janine, I think I can tell whether it’s him or a conman. I want to give him my vote for Best Actor. The poor guy was… (whispers inaudibly).

 

DiCaprio smiles, takes out his phone and starts scrolling down a list of names again

 

DELANEY: What do you mean he wasn’t? He’s sitting right here, I’m telling you, and he says he was.

 

DiCaprio pockets the phone, and leans forward, looking concerned.

 

DELANEY: What difference does it make if the bear was female? What are you trying to say? Is this a trick question to make me commit a micro-aggression? Wait, the bear was CGI? So he couldn’t have been–

 

DiCaprio bolts from the kitchen island, and glad-hands Delaney in passing.

 

DICAPRIO: Delaney, it’s been great catching up. Keep watering that plant now.

The Talk of the Town

Emma Donoghue’s original script promised to be one of the highlights of the Dublin Theatre Festival but this much-hyped take on the life and work of New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan failed to do justice to its subject and cast.

Director Annabelle Comyn reunites with her The House actors Catherine Walker, Darragh Kelly, and Lorcan Cranitch for another period piece. We meet Brennan (Walker) just as she has swapped Ranelagh for Manhattan and joined the New Yorker. But while cartoonist Addams (Kelly) and writer St Clair McKelway (Owen McDonnell) welcome their editor William Shawn (Cranitch)’s lippy new recruit, her ambition to write the Talk of the Town column staggers them.

Brennan though is good enough to quickly secure that coveted job, and then to start filing the magazine with chilling, incisive short stories about her miserable childhood. We glimpse that traumatic past complete with voiceover in scenes staged on a set within Paul O’Mahony’s set in which her parents (Barry Barnes, Michele Forbes) play out their psychodramas. But these flashbacks are quite overplayed, and, like the play, far too fragmentary.

This feels like a screenplay in disguise. There are scenes which last about a minute to play and are there purely for the sake of one good line. This approach largely kills any dramatic momentum, and a perverse decision is taken to ignore an obvious curtain at Brennan’s “atomic age marriage”. Kelly is nicely acerbic, McDonnell swaggers with some depth, and Cranitch has some wonderful moments as the long-suffering editor.

Walker is nicely acidic, but we never get a real feel for the quality of Brenna’s writing, which lessens her despair at writer’s block, while the happy ending is as perverse in its historical opportunism as Scorsese’s The Aviator.

3/5

Scream on the Rocks

I was listening to ‘Pure Shores’ while unsuccessfully trying to find someone else excited about seeing Scream 4 a few weeks ago, and it led to these musings on how something can be all-conquering, then just disappear…

I was surprised that no one I knew was excited about a new Scream film, given that Kevin Williamson had returned to writing duties, and has lately been writing wonderful (cliff-hanger a minute, major twist every episode) dark popcorn for The Vampire Diaries. 11 years though is a long time… The Beach was released in February 2000 and, this being in prehistory when MTV not only played music but played certain videos on constant rotation, its imagery penetrated deep into people who never saw the film courtesy of All Saints’ video for the sublime ‘Pure Shores’ incorporating an awful lot of clips from Danny Boyle’s film. 11 years ago I finally saw Scream on TV and then Scream 3 in the cinema in quick succession and never got round to watching The Beach till 2003. It’s odd to think that these films, which were all pervasive at the time, seem to have been more or less forgotten. In the case of Danny Boyle his belated and ill-advised entrance to major Hollywood movies has been completely forgotten because of a couple of belting truly Alex Garland scripted movies since, and an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire. The Beach also represented after the American Psycho debacle DiCaprio’s attempt to make a post-Titanic film that proved he could act. He’s long since been able to point to his Scorsese collection, and latterly Revolutionary Road and Inception, so The Beach is also a footnote for him.

But why has Scream fallen so low in popular esteem that its belated sequel could so utterly flop? Perhaps Scream has been a victim of its own success. It brought forth a wave of self-conscious horror films like Final Destination where good jokes were as important as scary shocks, and the audience and film-makers continually winked at each other regarding clichéd conventions of horror cinema that could still be exploited to make you jump in your seat, but only if that was followed by a good pay-off line. That arguably brought forth a counter-wave, the infamous torture porn of Saw, Hostel and Wolf Creek, where the film-makers grabbed the audience by the throat, demanded they stop winking, stop turning away, look at this horror, be horrified, and start screaming now… Now it seems to safe to declare torture porn more or less dead, we seem to be stuck in a field of shlock, Piranha 3-D, the everpresent efficient teen horror, My Bloody Valentine, and nouvea 70s viciousness in the form of remakes, Last House on the Left, and nasty originals, Eden Lake. In that landscape where torture porn seems to have permanently upped the acceptable ante for both gore and viciousness the very concept of a Scream 4 is an anomaly if not an embarrassment.

I only hoped that Scream 4 might be as good as Scream 2, but truthfully it’s more like Scream 3, the one Williamson didn’t write – an efficient film with flashes of inspiration. There are wonderful moments throughout, not least Courteney Cox muttering that a massacre must take place at a Stab marathon, “what could be more meta?”; a confused David Arquette asks what that means, to which she replies “I don’t know, it’s just some word I heard the kids using.” Scream was a great film because it was original, the cold open of Scream 4 with its nods to how Scream 2 introduced Stab, a film of the events of Scream, goes far too far in alienating the audience with postmodern meta-nonsense at the expense of emotional engagement. When you have not one, not two, but three different sets of TV stars (from, deep breath, 90210, Privileged, Veronica Mars, True Blood, oh forget it) all enacting the same basic scenario with commentary on the predictability of said scenario, mixed with snipes at torture porn, it’s time to return to basics. But the basics aren’t easy. The motive of the Ghostface Killer is a huge problem. Each sequel has tied itself in ever more preposterous knots regarding motivation, and Scream 4 obeys that rule of sequels. An even greater problem is the split focus caused by the bizarre notion the film persistently voices about itself being a remake rather than a sequel. The ‘new’ versions of original characters Billy Loomis, Randy and Stu don’t work at all because they are severely underwritten, while the beloved original characters aren’t given enough screen-time either. Hayden Panetierre and Emma Roberts are the only actors of the new young cast given enough material to really make an impression, and a good deal of this is purely due to their skills rather than the script. Roberts in particular is not afraid to be shown in a far colder light emotionally than you can imagine her aunt ever being willing to play, and her relationship with screen cousin Neve Campbell powers the film.

And then, if you’re me, you realise something with a shock while watching – Adam Brody isn’t going to step up to the plate in the third act and do something, his minor supporting role is just that; he has been totally forgotten. How terrifyingly forgotten The OC has become. Only 4 years after it finished its 4 season run which was captivating and hilarious and spawned a whole set of music, books, comics, styles and clichés, Seth Cohen himself, Adam Brody, can’t seem to get good parts anymore outside of Jason Reitman enabled cameos. Josh Schwartz is now the guy who co-created Gossip Girl or Chuck. He’s never thought of as the youngest creator of a primetime network show which was what The OC made him. And so it is that Kevin Williamson is now the co-creator of The Vampire Diaries not the wunderkind behind Scream or even Dawson’s Creek. Glory is fleeting…