Salocin

Charade / The Truth About Charlie

I asked the remarkably knowledgable man behind the counter in my local video store for a recommendation. I wanted a good film, mainstream, that wasn't going to stretch my overused and underfunded intellectual resources.

He gave me The Truth About Charlie, and said, "You should absolutely watch the original, Charade, which is on the reverse of the DVD. If you really want to, you can then watch the feature on the front".

He was right, Carey Grant and Audrey Hepburn are amazing in Charade, the plot tight and the dialogue supreme. It just doesn't quite wash in the modern version though.

Charade is a 1963 film starring Carey Grant and Audrey Hepburn. It is an extremely well put together film with taut story, extreme internal consistency, great continuity and sharp, fun dialogue. It is in particular the dialogue that give the characters that 'larger than life' aspect, rather than an ability to jump tall buildings and drive fast cars.

The Truth About Charlie is a modern remake of Charade starring Mark Wahlberg and the scrumptious Thandie Newton that completely fails to deliver the goods for a number of reasons...

First in my mind is that they messed around with the roles of the characters. In particular they changed the relative ages and thus the underlying relationships; they changed the detective from a man to a woman, they equalised the roles of the male and female lead, giving them similar strengths and weaknesses to avoid the more traditional "male" and "female" roles of the 60s and they made some very bad people in Charade victims of a conspiracy in Charlie. Finally, they cut out or dicked around with a number of scenes that were intricate parts of the exposition in Charade.

None of these changes would have mattered had the structure been altered in a way that made the new story consistent with the changes. Unfortunately they didn't bother to rewrite to this extent, and so what was originally consistent becomes confusing, and more time is spent figuring out what the hell is going on in the remake than the original because it is not so clearly communicated.

This leaves a lot less time to appreciate the performances. But that's a good thing, because they're really nothing special. Mark Wahlberg impressively underwhelms, whereas Thandie Newton is not nearly helpless or hapless enough to justify the attention she gets. The romance fades like a wilted leaf and has to be postponed to the end and the other characters are mere window-dressing. Particularly galling to me was that where the original used French in a charming and nonchalant way that meshed nicely with the character's lives in Paris, the second movie jolted uncomfortably though the French bits, almost as if it can't wait for them to be over.

Having lost the old storyline, a number of adjustments need to be made to reconstruct moments of energy and suspense, including a very pointless race through the streest and metros of Paris.

I think I would be much less nasty about this film (particularly since I could watch a silent movie with Thandie Newton in it and walk away with just a comment on how pretty her face is) had I not seen the original moments before the remake. Unfortunately, Charlie has less than half the class of it's elder sibling, and I would suggest that putting them both on the same DVD, while it certainly cheered me up, did no favours to the more modern of the two movies.