THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE

By: Abbie Bernstein
Review Date: Friday, October 25, 2002

THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE is a remake of CHARADE, the 1962 comedic thriller in which Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn romanced and suspected each other all over Paris, under the direction of Stanley Donen. Director Jonathan Demme accentuates the considerable charms of the City of Light, which are unfading, but times have changed when it comes to McGuffin-driven plots, something that the script by Demme & Steve Schmidt and Peter Joshua and Jessica Bendinger doesn't seem to have fully grasped. Conventions that were beguiling and suspenseful when the original was made depended a lot on being fresh which they were in 1962. Audiences in 2002 have come to expect a few more twists that CHARLIE simply doesn't provide.

While on vacation, Regina Lampert (Thandie Newton) flirts with cute American Joshua Peters (Mark Wahlberg). Regina is married but feels guiltless, as she plans to tell her husband Charles (Stephen Dillane) that she wants a divorce when she comes home. Charles stands Regina up at the airport typical of the behavior that's made her decide the marriage is a mistake but Joshua considerately gives her a lift to her door. Upon returning to the lavish Lampert Parisian apartment, Regina is shocked to find the place stripped to the floorboards and two police detectives waiting for her. Charles has been murdered. Just as shocking, the ostensible art dealer from Switzerland turns out to have had a handful of passports in different names with different nationalities. Reeling from this news, Regina is soon trailed by three menacing characters and approached by U.S. government operative Bartholomew (Tim Robbins), who tells her that Charles made off with a fortune several years ago and now his old partners want their hands on it. Joshua keeps turning up to offer assistance.

Wahlberg plays

Joshua as a reasonably nice young man who's not a very good liar as opposed to the dashing stranger that the genre generally requires, but this wouldn't be such a problem if we were made to care at all about the caper. However, the puzzle pieces are presented to us in such a desultory, haphazard way and our heroine Regina has so little interest in figuring out what's going on that it's impossible to be caught up in the plot if the main character doesn't really care, why should we? This leaves us with individual scenes which have a certain amount of quirkiness and beauty (again, hard to go wrong when shooting in Paris) but aren't colorful enough to distract us from the fact that we're never terribly engaged by the story. There is a lightness of tone and some nifty touches Charles Aznavour appears in person for an onscreen serenade when someone puts on a CD of his music but almost no real laughs.

Newton, however, has the kind of grace and spirit that allows her to carry the film to a certain extent we may not be interested in the goings-on, but we can tell why the other characters are interested in her. Robbins is fairly droll as the gruff, deadpan secret agent and Christine Boisson is enjoyably skeptical as the primary police investigator on the case.

THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE is painless, but it works better as an inexpensive Parisian vacation than as a narrative experience.

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