The Truth About Charlie (2002)

Directed by Jonathan Demme
Written by Jonathan Demme, Steve Schmidt, Peter Stone, and Jessica Bendinger

A preposterous and bombastic stew of half-baked direction, increasingly silly performances, and incongruous in-references, Jonathan Demme's The Truth About Charlie goes so far out of its way trying to distinguish itself from the movie on which it was based that it could almost be called experimental cinema. But like a lot of experimental cinema, it primarily succeeds in being boring and bad.

Demme attempts a remake of Charade, the Cary Grant-Audrey Hepburn film from 1963 that, while essentially poor man's Hitchcock, is still infinitely more interesting than the run-of-the-mill slick Hollywood thriller of the 2000s. Mark Wahlberg is the Cary Grant, which itself is pretty much an idea bound for failure, and Thandie Newton is called upon to carry the film, which she clearly can not do.

It's one of those "Who can you trust??? Everyone seems to be lying!!!!!"-type movies, to the point where you just stop caring whether you can trust anyone, or whether anyone is telling the truth. Much like my childhood!

It doesn't help that Demme packs the film with arbitrarily chosen wall-to-wall music, "stylish" photography, and enough French New Wave allusions to choke Charles Aznavour. Who, incidentally, makes a couple of delightful, but entirely unnecessary, cameos. He is such a pleasure, though, that I'm left with an overall good feeling about the film, even though almost everything else about it was crap.

The film takes some unintentionally laughable turns by endeavoring to have Mark Wahlberg try to look menacing in a fedora, and the climax of the film more or less centering around two characters pulling each other's legs while each tries to climb a staircase. And Tim Robbins, who incidentally is the killer, offers up an accent that would be more appropriate for, like, one of those kids' movies where computer-generated dinosaurs and/or toys talk.

Curiously, the DVD features Charade in its entirety as a "bonus movie," almost as though the producers are acknowledging what a piece of horseshit the remake is by giving you the option to see the same movie done better.

Review by La Fée