The Truth About Charlie

[JunkerSeed]

Saw this today, and it's certainly different than most of the other stuff in theaters. It's a quirky, off-beat remake of an old movie called "Charade", starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hephurn. It's also a big homage to the French New Wave, a group of very weird, exciting french movies that came out in the late 50's and revolutionized all kinds of stuff. Good example of how this is like one of those movies, is a scene where they pop in a cd, and suddenly the guy who sings it is outside of their window singing. Just odd stuff like that. Stuff that you dont expect to be represented visually.

 

Anyways, the story's about a woman who's husband is killed just 3 months after they're married. She goes to the police station and learns that her husband wasn't who he seemed, he had like 5 passports and stole money from lots of angry people. All of a sudden people are telling her that she has access to the money, and she has no idea how to get to it. There's a mysterious stranger (Mark Walberg) and a US agent (Tim Robbins) that seem nice enough, but she cant trust anybody. It's mostly just lots of fun.

 

The plot could lend itself to being something much more dramatic and typical but the way it's done just gives it this cool sort of energy. It has these great, weird camera angles that most movies avoid like the plague, but totally work in this context. The dialogue also still has a classy sort of wit to it left over from the original movie, you usually only get this kinda dialogue in older stuff. The music contributes a lot too, definately a throwback to older, 60's stuff. The style is just great overall, the movie's more style than plot, which suited it just fine.

 

Thandie Newton does a great fucking job. Other than just being really hot, she's absolutely perfect in this. It's totally her movie, she does audrey hephurn justice. The other performances were cool too, Tim Robbins was great, a really subtley weird character.

 

The story gets pretty confusing and convoluted at the end, but you pretty much figure out whats going on. All in all, a really cool, stylish, fun movie. It really helps if you're a fan of Truffaut or the other French new wave directors, but its not a necesarry thing at all. I reccomend it, it totally works as a good change of pace from most of the other stuff you see, sort of exposes how derivative lots of other movies are.