Thandie Newton in The Truth About Charlie (2002)

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The studio managed to make lemonade out of this lemon. The Truth About Charlie is a weak remake of Charade that bombed miserably at the box office. They released a 2-sided DVD with Charade on the reverse side, thus making the package worth a look.

I guess The Truth About Charlie must have seemed like a sensible project to director Jonathan Demme. On the surface, it met the basic remake criteria pretty well. 1963's Charade was an excellent film, but not so excellent that remaking it would cause a scandal or violate treasured memories.

Charade is one of those really corny old-time Hollywood studio movies made in the dying gasp before the modern director/auteur era began in the USA. One small element will serve to illustrate my point about how the film belonged to the old, romantic, Hollywood era. The film has quite a lovely, Oscar-nominated theme song. Imagine how it was used in the film. One scene took place next to a carousel. Guess which song the carousel played over and over as the horses spun dizzyingly. One scene took place on a dinner cruise through Paris. Guess what the wandering minstrels were playing. One scene takes place in a Paris cabaret. I'll bet you can figure out what's coming next. That was a familiar device in the old studio films.

In short, Charade was a pretty good pseudo-Hitchcock film, albeit made without Hitchcock, in fact made by a director who specialized in syrupy musicals, not thrillers.

Perhaps the modernization of the film could have lifted it to glory, but there was one problem in trying to improve it. The script wasn't really that good. Charade was only terrific in the first place because it featured the magical pairing of two unique performers: Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. Take away those two, replace them with Doris Day and Fred MacMurray, and it is a mediocre film, not number 166 of all time at IMDb . The comic banter between Grant and Hepburn was also scripted well, but it was those two performers who really made it shine.

The trick, therefore, in doing a remake, is to get some charismatic performers that can bring that Grant/Hepburn charm ...

... um ... like Mark Wahlberg and Thandie Newton.

You see where I'm going with this? If you go to a Minneapolis production of Camelot , it's just a musical. If you see it on Broadway, it's an event with Richard Burton and Julie Andrews and Robert Goulet. The actors in Minneapolis say the same lines, but they just don't have the unique chemistry that made the play JFK's model for his administration. Think of The Truth About Charlie as the Minneapolis road-show version of Charade. Nothing really wrong with it, but nothing to make you want to see this instead of the original.

In my opinion, director Jonathan Demme gummed the remake up with lots of unnecessary gimmicks. Do you remember how Mike Myers worked Bert Bacharach into the Austin Powers movies? I think that was cute, and I hope he does it as long as the series lasts, but those films are supposed to be comedies. The Truth About Charlie is supposed to be a mystery, yet the director kept tearing down that fourth wall to introduce Charles Aznavour, the legendary French singer and star of Shoot the Piano Player. Marky Mark puts on an Aznavour album to seduce Thandie - and there's Aznavour singing away in Wahlberg's apartment, like Bacharach in Austin Powers. Creepily enough, he's watching the lovers. Later, Aznavour sings away on camera in the film's finale, again a part of the action. There are stylistic gimmicks as well, including lots of jittery facial close-ups and unnerving cuts, and the usual Tarantino scene with 20 guys in a circle all pointing their guns at each other. The original movie may have been corny, but at least it had the elegant majesty of an old Hollywood picture. The remake had a feel of an older director trying to show he could still be really hip with some jazzy new-fangled techniques. I overrated The Truth About Charlie at a C+ the first time I reviewed it. It is a C-, and barely so. Frankly, I found it quite irritating.

Nudity Report: Olga Sékulic is seen topless from the side-rear in the opening scene. Thandie Newton is poking through her blouse in a braless scene, and is seen naked (??) behind a frosted glass shower door.

Critics Vote: Ebert 3/4, Berardinelli 3/4.

IMDb Summary: IMDb voters score it 4.8/10.

DVD Info: Widescreen anamorphic 2.35:1. Same disk also includes a widescreen anamorphic 1.85:1 version of Charade.


Written by: Scoopy …courtesy of Scoopy.net