The overconfidence game

'The Hoax' and 'Color Me Kubrick' explore the art of the con.

from the April 6, 2007 edition

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Gere, who is always sharpest when he's playing double-edged personalities, is fun to watch, and Hallström conveys a bit of the circuslike atmosphere of the times. But he overreaches in try-ing to turn the film into a commentary on the politically corrupt 1970s. He brings in, on rather flimsy evidence, a link between Hughes and Watergate. What he may not sufficiently realize is that the Clifford Irving story is timeless. Con men may adjust to the particular zeitgeists of their eras – the Web, for example, would have rendered Irving's hoax null and void – but no doubt there were Cro-Magnon men who perpetrated counterfeit cave paintings.

"Color Me Kubrick" is a far more modest movie, but in some ways is more successful than "The Hoax" in conveying how deeply people want to believe something is true against all evidence. Alan Conway, who passed himself as Kubrick in the 1990s before finally being caught, didn't even look like the famous director. He hadn't even seen many of Kubrick's famous movies.

Director Brian Cook and screenwriter Anthony Frewin were both long-term Kubrick production associates, so they know this case history intimately. Although Kubrick was not as much of a mystery man as Hughes, his face was still sufficiently unknown by the public for Conway's deception to succeed for a time.

Malkovich is so comically daring here that, at times, he made me think of Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty in Kubrick's "Lolita." (The connection may be intentional, since the film also channels "A Clockwork Orange" and even "2001.") Malkovich captures not only the nuttiness of Conway, with his smorgasbord of foreign-sounding accents, but also his pathos.

Conway simply wanted to be famous – he never bilked any of his victims.

With varying degrees of success, both "Color Me Kubrick" and "The Hoax" are ultimately about the need to be famous at all costs.

They also serve as a reminder that the current celebrity-crazed culture is not as novel as we'd hoped.

Grades: "The Hoax" – B; "Color Me Kubrick" – B+

•"The Hoax" is rated R for language; "Color Me Kubrick" is not rated.

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