Also this issue: Snap Judgments Paul Schrader on Bob Crane: star, sex addict and unwitting icon. -Cindy Fuchs Screen Picks -Sam Adams New Continuing Repertory Film Showtimes

October 24-30, 2002

movies

Nouvelle Vagueness

French miss: Mark Wahlberg wears many hats in The Truth About Charlie.

Jonathan Demme chokes on his baguette with The Truth About Charlie.

by Sam Adams

Here’s a great idea: Jonathan Demme pays homage to the French New Wave.

Here’s a not-so-great idea: Marky Mark in a beret. It would be a joy to report that The Truth About Charlie, Demme’s nouvelle vague remake of Stanley Donen’s Charade, is the vehicle through which the director recovers the loose-limbed approach of his pre-Silence of the Lambs work -- a joy, and a lie. In fact, Charlie is as misconceived and poorly executed a movie as Demme has ever made, a hapless mishmash of spy-movie cliches and an aimless attempt to undercut them.

As in the 1963 original, Regina (played here by Thandie Newton) is a freshly married woman who returns from vacation to find her apartment stripped bare, her husband Charlie vanished along with all her worldly possessions. That mystery, at least, is soon solved, when the Paris police show up and inform her that her husband has been found dead, apparently thrown from a train outside town, but more uncertainties are soon to follow -- like the matter of her husband's real name, or the fact that he was some sort of government operative instead of an art dealer.

Joshua Peters (Mark Wahlberg) is ostensibly a kind-hearted stranger who just happens to keep turning up whenever Regina needs help, but of course, we know better than to trust that assessment, even though he does prove useful in helping her escape the trio of baddies (Lisa Gay Hamilton, Joong-Hoon Park and Ted Levine, Silence's Buffalo Bill) who keep threatening her with harm unless she hands over the money she didn't even know her husband had. On top of all that, there's G-Man Bartholomew (Tim Robbins, with an absurd Boston accent), who claims to want to help, but seems awful eager to retrieve Uncle Sam's dough.

Demme throws in references both visual -- a clip from Shoot the Piano Player, cameos by Agnès Varda and Anna Karina -- and textual (a hotel named for Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque Française), and Tak Fujimoto's camera zooms around with such abandon I thought for a while the picture had been shot on digital video. But if Demme was trying for anything like an anti-genre genre pic, along the lines of Piano Player or Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, he should have jettisoned the original script, rather than hewing inconsistently to a creaky (even at the time) plot and the attempts to create chemistry between his patently uninterested stars. (Even Charles Aznavour's bizarre Austin Powers-esque appearances can't turn up the heat.) Demme has taken flak for casting Wahlberg in the Cary Grant role, but the response has been that he wanted to get "as far from the original as possible," and in that, he has succeeded. The problem is, he hasn't managed to go anywhere. Clearly drawn to the outsider's perspective, Demme's been hamstrung by his post-Silence success. The only satisfying movies he's made since are long-form music videos like Storefront Hitchcock. It's as if he needs to submerge himself in someone else's personality to find himself. (Perhaps it helps to work in a form that offers little hope of runaway success.) Whatever the answer, though, The Truth About Charlie isn't it.