The Truth About Charlie

A typical viewer after 40 minutes of The Truth About Charlie.

Just what is it about cover versions? The pop music industry’s obsessed with the idea of persuading a modern-day artist or band to reinvent songs from the past, convinced it’ll be a sure-fire way to land a quick wad of cash with a minimum of risk or effort. But in practice, it hardly ever works. So it is with Hollywood, where studios and producers constantly come up with ostensibly clever ideas about remaking old movies (and, occasionally, TV shows). It’s reached near-epidemic proportions in recent years, and while there have been some artistic successes (including Steven Soderbergh’s recent reworking of Solaris) most of the output of this regurgitated-sausage factory is best left on the shelf to quietly go mouldy.

Just what was going through the minds of Jonathan Demme and his producers is anyone’s guess, but when they got the notion that the classic 1963 Audrey Hepburn film Charade was due for a remodelling, someone somewhere should have rung the alarm bells and put the idea out of its misery before the cameras rolled. Charade didn’t need a fresh coat of paint - indeed, it still looks as fresh now as it did the day it hit cinemas 40 years ago. Its principal strength wasn’t the plot - rather, this was a movie that succeeded thanks to the attention-grabbing charisma of Hepburn, the suave star power of Cary Grant and Peter Stone’s witty, Hitchcock-inspired screenplay, which was loaded with memorable lines and silly gags that made it an instant audience favourite.

"Errr... Mr Demme? My make-up won't wash off..."

For The Truth About Charlie, Demme has taken Stone’s script and reinvented it ludicrously. Some key lines still exist (hence Stone’s co-writing credit, which the displeased writer had listed under the pseudonym Peter Joshua - Cary Grant’s character name in Charade) and the underlying plot is essentially the same, but Demme and his co-writers have taken the liberty of moving events forward to present day Paris. So far, so good, you may think. But Demme’s idea here is to create a veritable tribute to the French New Wave cinema of the 1960s; the result is almost unwatchable, a confused and muddled mess loaded to the gills with clever movie references that nobody but film critics and die-hard French cinema buffs will understand.

Regina Lambert (Thandie Newton) is married to a wealthy man who’s just had the misfortune of being thrown off a fast-moving train and killed. This isn’t a major problem in itself, as she was planning on divorcing him anyway. But when she arrives back at their apartment, she finds that the entire place has been stripped bare; the police inform her that the entire contents have been sold and the money’s all gone. By chance - or is it? - she runs into Joshua Peters (Mark Wahlberg), a man she’d first encountered while overseas. He seems nice enough, and happy to help protect her when a group of rather nasty henchpeople (including one of the lawyers from The Practice!) come after her to try and find the missing money. But all is not as it seems, it seems.

While Charade romped through its somewhat ludicrous plot with a great sense of fun and frivolity, The Truth About Charlie takes it for granted that the audience has already seen the 1963 film and will be able to figure out what’s going on from there. But for anyone who hasn’t seen Charade, Charlie is going to be a decidedly confusing 100 minutes. Between all the jump-cuts, handheld camera chaos, shot-on-video flashback sequences and other technical bravado, someone forgot to tell the cast that they might want to try connecting with the audience. The handheld camerawork in particular would have been hard to take on the big screen, particularly since Demme seems immensely fond of extreme close-ups. But the technical melting pot’s only half the problem. It’s the casting that seals it.

Everything's coming up Aznavour.

Thandie Newton has an impossible task in the Hepburn role and does the best she can with it - though her near-Cockney accent seems oddly out of place - while Wahlberg is just… well, there. Assorted other characters come and go to try to add to the intrigue, but when even Tim Robbins can’t save the film you know it’s in trouble. When Charles Aznavour shows up - playing himself - to stand in a scene and croon, it should be a funny, warm moment. Instead, it just seems like an embarrassingly tacky walk-on guest appearance of the kind that destroyed The Simpsons. Far too clever for its own good, Charlie collapses under the weight of its own pretension before the half-way mark, after which it’s just a hollow hodge-podge of stylistic trickery with the occasional dash of technical flair to help keep the audience awake.

Shot in Panavision by long-time Demme collaborator Tak Fujimoto, Charlie looks pretty good on DVD, the 16:9 enhanced transfer supplying the film at its correct 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Very true to Demme’s intentions (not surprisingly), this would be a perfect effort were it not for a few scenes containing some decidedly distracting aliasing, as well as a little too much of a heavy-handed approach to digital edge enhancement which, while not obnoxious, only seems to exacerbate the aliasing when it occurs. Aside from these problems - and they’re fairly brief - this is an excellent transfer of rather difficult material.

"...like a tiiiiger."

A fairly unassuming Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack is on offer for this film, with the dialogue firmly anchored in the centre channel and almost everything else spread across the front speakers; the rears are hardly used aside from some occasional spot effects and elements of Rachel Portman’s eclectic music score. Fidelity is fine, but considering the visual flamboyance it accompanies, this seems like an oddly reserved audio mix. Note that the US version of this disc contains a DTS audio track as well; however, this isn’t the kind of film that really needs that kind of attention, and Dolby Digital serves it just fine.

There’s one thing we should mention first: almost ALL of the extras from the US version are missing on this Australian release of The Truth About Charlie. Commentary, deleted scenes, making-of doco, trailers - all gone. And you know what? We don’t care! Seriously, what kind of terminal masochist would want to see more of this film? When the reaction to the end credits rolling is a sigh of relief and an easing of a painful 90-minute headache, the very thought of having to sit through a bunch of extra features about how it was all made… well, that’s a prospect that makes a three-day Carry On marathon suddenly seem appealing. Look, we know that some people out there loved this film; if that’s the case, don’t hesitate, get yourself off to your favourite online store and order yourself the US version. But for the rest of us, there’s only one reason to buy this disc at all, and it’s not the movie featured on the cover. No, instead it’s the one and only extra that’s survived from the US release. And it’s a beauty. In fact, the perfect score for extra features in this review is due entirely to this one offering…

There can be only one; Audrey Hepburn as Regina in Charade.

Charade: Yes, Charade. The entire movie, supplied on its own dual-layered disc and freshly minted from a brand new 16:9 transfer of the film. This is the real deal - a film that, four decades after it was made, still has the ability to keep you glued to the screen for the entire duration. It’s got laughs, it’s got suspense, it’s got Paris in the ‘60s... and, of course, it’s got Audrey Hepburn. This is currently the best available transfer of Charade, and the restoration work is lovely; there are a few scenes that remain grainy and faded, but with the exception of one short moment, these all involve optical work (opening titles, for example) which obviously aren’t part of the original negative from which this new transfer was struck. Looking dazzling and vibrant in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio, this is a revelation for Charade fans, who up until now have been forced to put up with dreadful pan-and-scan public-domain DVDs (Universal virtually lost control of the film due to an omission in the copyright notices on the finished product; it’s good to see it back and being treated with the respect it deserves). Encoded at a huge bitrate, there are never any compression problems to distract from the fun; sound is, of course, mono (encoded as a Dolby 2.0 stream), taken from the magnetic tape masters.

We’re big fans of Demme’s work over here, but The Truth About Charlie is a self-indulgent mess, plain and simple. That it has to live in the shadow of the movie it’s trying to recreate only makes the experience more painful, and no amount of clever movie references or technical chicanery can save it.

But the bonus disc - the full original movie Charade, in its best available transfer - is a must-have, and should most definitely be watched before enduring the remake.