The truth about Demme What does one do when one’s Beloved proves a bust? Four years after his earnest, expensive, and ill-conceived adaptation of the Toni Morrison novel bombed out, Jonathan Demme remains faithful to his labor of love. "I was disappointed with the box office, and I was ecstatic with the film," he says. "That’s my reaction. It never got to #1. It got pulled to make more screens available for Waterboy. So the picture was out for four weeks, it made $20 million, and that was it. But a lot of people see it on DVD and cable and whatnot, and we get a lot of great mail about it, and we’re very proud of it. "We were convinced that we had made something that was of great importance and opened an almost three-hour-long movie about slavery. We were slightly mad, I guess. I have a hunch that our sell had a little sense of: ‘It’s time to take your medicine, America.’ If the me who didn’t make the movie was out on a Friday night and in Cinema 1 is Beloved and in Cinema 2 is Rush Hour, I gotta tell ya, I’m going to see Rush Hour . . . " Or maybe a film like The Truth About Charlie? It’s an adaptation of Stanley Donen’s 1963 mystery/romance Charade, in which a beautiful Paris widower is menaced by thugs and rescued by a knight who is not all he seems to be. Perhaps Demme is looking to change gears. Or perhaps he’s hoping to be a knight of sorts to Thandie Newton, Beloved’s beleaguered star. "Were it not for Thandie, I doubt that I would have pursued a remake of Charade," he says. "I was really looking for a movie to do with Thandie where she could be cast as a contemporary character, because she has specialized in outsiders and historical figures more than anything in the majority of pictures she’s done. And she’s a superb contemporary actress/person, and I felt I really wanted to make a picture that moved Thandie right up front and put her in a whole lot of trouble and see how she’d react to all that." Or how audiences might react to her — she is, after all, filling in for Audrey Hepburn. Even more controversial will be the casting of Mark Wahlberg in the role played by Cary Grant — the 31-year-old former Marky Mark hardly calls to mind the then 59-year-old icon of savoir faire. But Demme — whose first casting choice, Will Smith, passed in order to do Michael Mann’s Ali — thought there was no point in reprising the younger-woman/much-older-man dynamic of the first version. "That had to be one of the fundamental changes, because they had done that to perfection. I said, ‘Let’s make them the same age, and let’s make it the guy who falls head-over-heels and is really shackled by the fact that he’s lying through his teeth all the time.’ " But Mark Wahlberg? "I feel he is a gifted young actor. I’ve enjoyed seeing his growth from Boogie Nights into Three Kings. And my friend Paul Thomas Anderson — who was going to write the screenplay for me until, bastard, he had the idea for Punch-Drunk Love and went off and wrote a script for himself instead — was selling Mark. You don’t want to attempt to replicate Cary Grant, so going with Mark was going even further away. I wasn’t interested in people thinking that Mark had graduated cum laude from Harvard or anything." Little danger of that. But Demme might hope that Harvard graduates or at least film buffs give his new film more than a cursory glance. More than an homage to Grant and Hepburn or Hollywood, it’s a densely layered celebration of the French New Wave. Not only does it evoke that era in its freewheeling style and network of allusions, it features such New Wave figures as filmmaker Agnès Varda, singer/actor Charles Aznavour (from François Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianiste/Shoot the Piano Player), and Jean-Luc Godard superstar Anna Karina in cameos. "Shoot the Piano Player turned me on like no other film ever has," Demme acknowledges. "It opened a whole other film-appreciation door in my head. I think it was an organic thing that we arrived in Paris to make a picture and it was just sort of inevitable that there would be this harnessing for me of all the things I love about French movies. We were constantly coming up with stuff on the spot. We felt liberated, we felt very New Wave and undisciplined and spontaneous and wanted to make a movie that would feel a lot like that." Will audiences get caught up in that feeling? For Demme, the key test will be "the tango scene," late in the film, when Anna Karina sings a song and conventional narrative ceases and Demme’s love of artifice, allusion, and the New Wave takes over. "There’s the almost unavoidable question," he admits. " ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ "

The truth about filmmaking that Jonathan Demme probably learned in 1974 when he made Caged Heat for Roger Corman is that it’s supposed to be fun. He forgot that truth with Beloved, which was no fun at all. With The Truth About Charlie, he’s having fun once again.

Whether viewers will is another matter. Some might object to Demme’s remaking Stanley Donen’s winsome, Hitchcockian Charade (1963) in the first place; it’s a classic of sorts, and a polished if cold paradigm of a Hollywood style just about reaching its end. More will vent outrage at the casting — maybe not the delightful Thandie Newton in the Audrey Hepburn role, but Mark Wahlberg as Cary Grant? And some will be annoyed by or indifferent to Demme’s glorious indulgence in it all as he transforms an old chestnut into a mirrored box of allusions and illusions.

But the truth about The Truth About Charlie is that it’s Demme’s best film since The Silence of the Lambs, and the most distinctively his own work since Something Wild. Like the latter film, Truth is a layered pyrotechnic display ignited by an incandescent female performance — in this case, Newton’s, who makes a case for being the Audrey Hepburn of the new millennium.

At its best, the film combines levity and weight, inspired fancifulness with dense collage (in sound as well as image — known for his sublime and eclectic soundtracks, Demme here outdoes himself). For better and worse, the director pillages his storehouse of cinematic and musical influences and infatuations, following every whim of reference or reverence to the end. More than just a reprise of a 1963 Hollywood movie, the film celebrates the 1963 Hollywood way of making movies, but it also blends in ingredients from the then just-peaking French New Wave to make a sometimes exquisite, sometimes sodden soufflé.

Although the film is indelibly Demme’s, the narrative remains more or less faithful to the original. Charlie Lambert (Stephen Dillane) is dead almost before the opening credits; after a swift tryst on a train, he makes an abrupt exit. Estranged wife and now unwitting widow Regina Lambert (Newton) returns from a trip to find her Paris apartment stripped bare and the police commandant (Christine Boisson) at the door. Not only has her husband been murdered, but his ill-gotten cache of $6 million has vanished as well.

That arouses the attention of a trio of multi-cultural thugs — Il-Sang Li (Joong-Hoon Park), a slick Korean, Lola Jansco (Lisa Gay Hamilton), an elfin but lethal African-American, and Emil Zadapec (Ted Levine, conjuring Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet), a hypochondriacal wacko — who menace her obscurely. American Embassy official Mr. Bartholomew (Tim Robbins in a rough impersonation of Walter Matthau) takes Regina for a ride, à la The Third Man, on Paris’s Millennial Wheel, and his debriefing only adds to the confusion. But Joshua Peters (Wahlberg), the lumpish young fellow who always shows up when Regina needs him the most, and who should be the first person she suspects, is the only one whom, initially at any rate, she really trusts.

In Charade the trust is understandable; Grant’s character is old enough to be Hepburn’s father, and he acts like it. Hepburn’s pursuit of him seems as much abuse of the elderly as it does vicarious incest. In Truth, that erotic tension could be racial or, better yet, one of class — his lumpen crassness versus her ebullient refinement, her beauty and his beast. On the screen, though, when they’re together, not a lot is going on.

No, the real romantic pairing in Truth is Newton and the movie world of Jonathan Demme. Like a latter-day Alice in a postmodern wonderland, she follows his camera down sometimes blind alleys into shuttered market places where Agnès Varda will loom as a minatory widow, or rooms in the Hotel "Langlois" where Charles Aznavour will croon a ballad, or ballrooms where Anna Karina will sing the tango that connects every character and stops the story dead in its tracks. Newton emerges bewildered but still delightful. As for the film, the last shot is of the grave of François Truffaut. If he’s rolling in it, it’s probably with amusement.