Cinema - The Hoax

From the cynical vantage point of 2007 it’s hard to believe that anyone’s telling the truth anymore. A recent spate of  high-profile ‘fakes’ have destroyed whatever remaining faith we had in the traditional bastions of truthfulness - from the BBC’ fabrication of the Queen storming out of a photo shoot  to the Government’s alleged invention of the dossier that sparked the Iraq war. Back in 1973, however a nation was universally shocked to discover that a prominent auto-biography of reclusive US billionaire Howard Hughes was a fabrication. In the 2006 film, Hoax, which takes the real-life event as its subject, Richard Gere plays the struggling novelist Clifford Irving responsible for the infamous publishing scam, which earned him a whole lot of publicity and a six-figure advance. Compared to the Hitler Diaries scandal which followed ten years later it is tempting to view the episode as little more than a prank at the expense of a multinational publishing house and a billionaire capitalist. Especially in light of the links - which are hinted at - between Hughes and Nixon and the subsequent Watergate scandal. The film seems to want to make more of a moral problem for the viewer though, creating in Gere’s Irving a character whose self-centred ambition soon loses the audience's sympathy. You have to wonder, though, whether the film is not at times a little implicated in the crime it seems to condemn - it being difficult to know where and if we should find the gaps between Irving’s ‘true’ account and the film’s potentially fictionalised one. ER