Truth About Charlie: One Fraud of a Movie

For a new movie to really grab me, especially a drama, it has to be pretty compelling right now. The Truth About Charlie is most definitely NOT one of those movies. A tangled, muddled, overstylized chore of a film, even the movie's title is all wrong. It should have been called "Jonathan Demme Gets Drunk and Stoned in Paris, Discovers Music, and Makes a Bad Spy Flick."

Alright, follow me on this plot setup. Thandie Newton stars as Regina, the ditzy, estranged wife of a spy, who may or may not be dead. Regina arrives to her Paris home after a Caribbean vacation in which she caught the eye of a shadowy, secretive doofus played by Mark Wahlberg (with a very nice haircut, by the way). Soon, Regina is being tailed by three other secret-agent mercenary types (Ted Levine, Lisa Gay Hamilton, and Joong-Hoon Park) and by another man who appears to be a good-guy American operative (Tim Robbins) eager to help the young woman out.

I am purposely leaving out the character names of Wahlberg, Robbins, and the other three, because their names seem to change each and every time Regina catches them in a lie. All of them are after a $6 million payday that Regina's husband (who looks like the reanimated corpse of John Cazale) allegedly stole from them. There is also some business about rare stamps that comes out of left field, along with bits about a failed covert mission years earlier in a ridiculous, Vietnam-style flashback. I say ridiculous, because the various main characters are all ambushed in the flashback sequence by unseen machine-gun fire and mortars, yet miraculously they all live to tell the tale. The film ends with one of the longest movie stand-offs (in slow-motion rain, of course) with NO payoff (NONE!) in film history.

The Truth About Charlie is one of the most confused, disjointed movies of the year. It constantly drifts back and forth from being a silly spoof to a quasi-serious heist caper. Now, I don't know. Maybe in today's post-Roger Moore, Austin Powers world, it's close to impossible to make a serious spy film. I thought The Bourne Identity did a splendid job earlier this year. The Truth About Charlie, though, is just a mish-mash. It has characters slipping on waxed floors and affecting funny accents. But it also has several characters who die violent deaths (including the sacrificial African-American woman). And nothing is consistent. In one scene, Regina appears sharp and intelligent. In the next, she does or says something so witless that you just completely give up on the character.

And I have never seen a director the caliber of Demme (whose directorial credits include The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia) take his hands so completely off the wheel on a major film. People get on trains headed from Paris to London in The Truth About Charlie, and yet they depart the train ... still in Paris (never figured that one out). Regina keeps running into the same random, black-dressed widow on the streets of Paris time and again. Why? Only Demme really knows. Even more perplexing were the various times when characters would end their scenes by looking into the camera and just screaming. Screaming!

That's to say nothing about the style of filmmaking employed by Demme and cinematographer Tak Fujimoto. Nearly the entire movie is shot with what can only be described as an "Unsteadycam." The result is the motion-picture equivalent of sea-sickness. Within the first of 15 minutes, I actually wanted to stop LOOKING at this movie. I wanted to yell, "Hold the freakin' camera steady!" It was like looking at a movie through a fishbowl. No, it was worse. It was like looking at a movie from INSIDE a fishbowl, and Demme was outside poking his finger at my eyeballs.

His other visual touch here is to shoot all of his actors in extreme close-up as they say their lines to each other all the while looking directly into the camera. I guess Demme was trying to get the audience to think: "Gosh, Marky Mark is looking right at me while saying his lines. Can I believe him?" This might have been a good idea in several key scenes where the characters have to decide whom to trust. But to do this throughout the ENTIRE movie is just amateurish and stupid. And I don't want to read any review on Friday where Demme is praised for his use of locations in the film. Any idiot with access to Panavision products can film Paris and make it look good. I mean, come on. It's friggin' Paris!

Demme, what was swimming through your mind when you made this film?! I now have this sick yearning to rent the DVD when it comes out and re-watch the movie with the director's commentary turned on. I can just hear Demme now: "Oh, I remember the day we shot this scene. Fuji and I just polished off an eight-ball and we decided to shoot everything from the actors' nostrils up. Yeah, man. Look at that shot right there! You can see up Marky Mark's nose! Look at that booger! That's not CGI. That's real nose cheese! Damn, bo-o-o-oy! It's such a ... GOOD VIBRATION!" Or better yet, maybe they could just include one commentary track where all you hear while the film is playing is Demme, Fujimoto, and Wahlberg taking massive bong hits and discussing French politics ... with no connection to the film whatsoever.

I'm kidding, of course. To my knowledge, no one was under the influence of hallucinogens while making this film. I wished I was while watching it, though, but no such luck. I usually find some good in each movie I watch. In regards to The Truth About Charlie, I really liked the soundtrack to this film. There you go. There's some praise. There is also a neat little spoof of Demme's Silence of the Lambs and Robbins' part in The Shawshank Redemption that plays out over the closing credits. And there is a pretty good foot chase that is undermined somewhat by the fact that Wahlberg is wearing a beret while running.

Ah, the heck with it. You want the truth about Charlie? Save your money and spend it on a better movie.

The Truth About Charlie is rated PG-13 for brief nudity, violence, and language.