The Truth About Charlie. Directed by Jonathan Demme. Written by Jonathan Demme, Steve Schmidt, Peter Joshua and Jessica Bendinger. With Thandie Newton, Mark Wahlberg, Tim Robbins, Joong-Hoon Park, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Ted Levine, Simon Abkarian, Stephen Dillane, Charles Aznavour, Agnès Varda, and Anna Karina. A Universal Pictures release. At the Showcase cinemas.

The truth about filmmaking that Jonathan Demme probably learned in 1974 when he made Caged Heat for Roger Corman is that it's supposed to be fun. He forgot that truth with Beloved, which was no fun at all. With The Truth About Charlie, he's having fun once again.

Whether viewers will is another matter. Some might object to Demme's remaking Stanley Donen's winsome, Hitchcockian Charade (1963) in the first place; it's a classic of sorts, and a polished if cold paradigm of a Hollywood style just about reaching its end. More will vent outrage at the casting -- maybe not the delightful Thandie Newton in the Audrey Hepburn role, but Mark Wahlberg as Cary Grant? And some will be annoyed by or indifferent to Demme's glorious indulgence in it all as he transforms an old chestnut into a mirrored box of allusions and illusions.

But the truth about The Truth About Charlie is that it's Demme's best film since The Silence of the Lambs, and the most distinctively his own work since Something Wild. Like the latter film, Truth is a layered pyrotechnic display ignited by an incandescent female performance -- in this case, Newton's, who makes a case for being the Audrey Hepburn of the new millennium.

At its best, the film combines levity and weight, inspired fancifulness with dense collage (in sound as well as image -- known for his sublime and eclectic soundtracks, Demme here outdoes himself). For better and worse, the director pillages his storehouse of cinematic and musical influences and infatuations, following every whim of reference or reverence to the end. More than just a reprise of a 1963 Hollywood movie, the film celebrates the 1963 Hollywood way of making movies, but it also blends in ingredients from the then just-peaking French New Wave to make a sometimes exquisite, sometimes sodden soufflé.

Although the film is indelibly Demme's, the narrative remains more or less faithful to the original. Charlie Lambert (Stephen Dillane) is dead almost before the opening credits; after a swift tryst on a train, he makes an abrupt exit. Estranged wife and now unwitting widow Regina Lambert (Newton) returns from a trip to find her Paris apartment stripped bare and the police commandant (Christine Boisson) at the door. Not only has her husband been murdered, but his ill-gotten cache of $6 million has vanished as well.

That arouses the attention of a trio of multi-cultural thugs -- Il-Sang Li (Joong-Hoon Park), a slick Korean, Lola Jansco (Lisa Gay Hamilton), an elfin but lethal African-American, and Emil Zadapec (Ted Levine, conjuring Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet), a hypochondriacal wacko -- who menace her obscurely. American Embassy official Mr. Bartholomew (Tim Robbins in a rough impersonation of Walter Matthau) takes Regina for a ride, à la The Third Man, on Paris's Millennial Wheel, and his debriefing only adds to the confusion. But Joshua Peters (Wahlberg), the lumpish young fellow who always shows up when Regina needs him the most, and who should be the first person she suspects, is the only one whom, initially at any rate, she really trusts.

In Charade the trust is understandable; Grant's character is old enough to be Hepburn's father, and he acts like it. Hepburn's pursuit of him seems as much abuse of the elderly as it does vicarious incest. In Truth, that erotic tension could be racial or, better yet, one of class -- his lumpen crassness versus her ebullient refinement, her beauty and his beast. On the screen, though, when they're together, not a lot is going on.

No, the real romantic pairing in Truth is Newton and the movie world of Jonathan Demme. Like a latter-day Alice in a postmodern wonderland, she follows his camera down sometimes blind alleys into shuttered market places where Agnès Varda will loom as a minatory widow, or rooms in the Hotel "Langlois" where Charles Aznavour will croon a ballad, or ballrooms where Anna Karina will sing the tango that connects every character and stops the story dead in its tracks. Newton emerges bewildered but still delightful. As for the film, the last shot is of the grave of François Truffaut. If he's rolling in it, it's probably with amusement.

Issue Date: October 25 - 31, 2002