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The truth is, Charlie gets a lot more screen time in this remake of Charade than he did in the 1963 version. In The Truth About Charlie, he has lines and everything (he was just a corpse being tossed from a moving train in the original), and that's one of a handful of changes made by filmmaker Jonathan Demme. Despite only these few modifications, however, Charlie plays like an entirely different film.
Filling Audrey Hepburn's shoes is Thandie Newton (from M:I-2 and Demme's Beloved), who could almost pass for Hepburn if you close your eyes and wish really hard. She plays Regina Lambert, a recently married and slightly dimwitted waif who, upon returning to Paris from a Caribbean holiday, discovers her flat ransacked and her husband (the aforementioned Charlie) in the morgue. As if that weren't enough to ruin her day (Regina looks more upset about the state of her apartment than her dead husband), she's also being pursued by the Paris police (Christine Boisson and Simon Abkarian) as well as three slimy baddies (Joong-Hoon Park, Lisa Gay Hamilton, and Ted Levine), who both believe Regina is in possession of $6 million worth of goods stolen by Charlie.
Along comes the helpful and nearly omnipresent Joshua Peters (Mark Wahlberg, Planet of the Apes), who offers comfort and advice to Regina, even though she clearly shouldn't trust him - Cary Grant played this role in the original. Just to make things even more confusing for the old girl, the screenplay also throws in a Mr. Bartholomew (Tim Robbins, Human Nature), who may or may not have designs on the stolen goods, which Regina may or may not have. Throw in a couple of extremely unusual fantasy sequences involving popular French singer Charles Aznavour, and you've got one zany, madcap film full of references to a ton of other pictures.
Fans of the French New Wave might get a kick out of Demme's slightly obscure homage to the genre (right down to the slightly more obvious Truffaut tribute over the closing credits). Everyone else will probably get nauseous. Demme, who co-adapted the screenplay (with Steve Schmidt, Jessica Bendinger and Charade creator Peter Stone, who uses the pseudonym Peter Joshua here, presumably to match the Wahlberg character), fills Charlie with a lot of dizzying, spinning takes with handheld cameras meant to portray Regina's bewilderment.
But Regina's bewilderment is one of Charlie's biggest problems (we won't mention the fact that Walhberg couldn't carry Grant's arsenic or old lace). Do we like our protagonists this naïve and.well, dumb? Newton's Regina makes the wrong decisions over and over again throughout the film, which becomes increasingly frustrating because she's clearly not affected by remorse (over her husband's death), fear (over the growing pile of dead bodies) or her heart (the chemistry between her and Joshua is non-existent). She just stands there and smiles through it all, which brings us back to the original point - Charlie nearly follows Charade to a T, but somehow manages to be a completely different film.
The tone of both films is incredibly uneven. Charade, which many people call the greatest Hitchcock film never made by Hitchcock, was always more about the chemistry and witty, double-entendre-filled banter between Hepburn and Grant than it was about building suspense. Though Demme & Co. retain some of the memorable lines from that film, they seem much more interested in the suspense angle (and even more interested in tossing in references to as many films as humanly possible) than the quirky romance. Sadly, neither version is successful in walking the line between "thriller" and "romantic comedy," though Charlie does feature an eclectic soundtrack with the likes of De Phazz, Transglobal Underground, Sparklehorse, Asian Dub Foundation, The Feelies, and The Soft Boys, as well as numbers from cameo contributors like Aznavour and Anna Karina. Of course, Henry Mancini's Oscar-nominated "Charade" is here, too, along with a song by Ted Demme, Jonathan's late nephew, to whom the film is dedicated.
On a side note, Peter Stone couldn't get anyone in Hollywood to show interest in his screenplay for Charade. The television writer ultimately sold a serialized version to Redbook. It became a big hit, and Stone adapted his story back into a screenplay for a suddenly interested Hollywood.
1:50 - PG-13 for some violence and sexual content/nudity
========== X-RAMR-ID: 33207 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 802286 X-RT-TitleID: 1117312 X-RT-SourceID: 595 X-RT-AuthorID: 1146 X-RT-RatingText: 6/10
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