THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE (2002) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Jonathan Demme
Thandie Newton, Mark Wahlberg, Tom Robbins
Thandie Newton plays a young woman who returns to Paris after a holiday in the Alps and finds that her apartment's cleaned out, her husband's in the morgue, and $6 million she didn't know existed has vanished without a trace. Three menacing characters, old colleagues of the deceased, think she has the money, and they want it, bad. An American embassy official (Tim Robbins) wants the money, too - apparently it was stolen from the U.S. government - and wants her to help him get it. Then there's this handsome stranger (Mark Wahlberg) who, well, it's hard to tell what he wants, but he always seems to turn up where she does, ready to lend a hand. Jonathan Demme's remake of "Charade" not surprisingly fails to live up to its classic model, despite some playful references to Peter Stone's original script and an affectionate nod to the French New Wave. It's not Newton's fault that she's not Audrey Hepburn, or Wahlberg's that he's not Cary Grant. They're just not Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. Robbins is a decent replacement for Walter Matthau, even trying out a New England accent, but "Charade" gave Matthau more funny stuff to do. The villains filling in for Ned Glass, George Kennedy and James Coburn are fashionably multicultural now, but Coburn's corduroy suit had more personality than all of them put together. Demme obviously loves "Charade", and you can't blame him for wanting to do a version of his own. But with the prospect of comparison not just a risk but inevitable, his chances of pulling it off were slim from the start. Like Gus Van Sant's meticulous reconstruction of "Psycho", it's an interesting cinematic exercise, but ultimately kind of pointless.
