Many people know Jonathan Demme from the 1992 Oscar ceremony speech when he picked up his Best Director award for "The Silence of the Lambs." Nervous and frantic, he said "um" more times than any other Oscar winner, ever.

    In the years following "Lambs," he worked sporadically, making grander, Academy Award-aimed films "Philadelphia" and "Beloved," as well as quirkier, obscure indies like "Cousin Bobby" and "Storefront Hitchcock."

    We might expect to find Demme grim or intimidating, fed up with the movie business and everything in it. Or maybe he'd be lost and confused. But in person, he's loose, casual and friendly and happy. 

    That happiness comes through in his new film, "The Truth About Charlie," a remake of Stanley Donen's 1963 "Charade" that opens Friday. 

    Demme isn't shy about calling a spade a spade. He says, "It's not a re-working. Let's face it. It's a remake." He compares it to his 1980s comedies "Something Wild" and "Married to the Mob," the fun kinds of picture he hasn't touched in years.

    Part of Demme's newfound energy comes from what he calls "our own New Wave going on in America" exemplified by Paul Thomas Anderson's "Punch-Drunk Love," Miguel Arteta's "The Good Girl" and Wes Anderson's "The Royal Tenenbaums."

    "That last one's a giant of a movie," he says, excitedly. "I'd love to try to sneak into that zone, even though I'm not the right age for it. I'd like to find material that's a little less predictable. I'd like it if I could make a film that showed the joy of filmmaking and the exuberance of filmmaking. That can be infectious."

    Demme says recent films by Tom Tykwer ("Run Lola Run") and Wong Kar-wai ("In the Mood for Love") really have floated his boat.

    For "The Truth About Charlie," Demme collaborated with "Charade's" original screenwriter, Peter Stone, and incorporated material from the film's original novelization.

    Still, the film takes off in liberating directions. Since it's set in Paris as was the original "Charade," Demme, a longtime fan of the French New Wave, visited the City of Lights, where he excitedly discovered its many classic New Wave movie locations. Making the film, he drifted more and more toward original New Wave ideals.

    In addition to shooting in a rangy, free-floating style with handheld cameras and jump-cuts, Demme also tracked down three icons from the New Wave.

    First, he cast Charles Aznavour -- the star of his favorite New Wave film, Francois Truffaut's "Shoot the Piano Player" -- in a small role. When the two romantic leads, Mark Wahlberg and Thandie Newton, have a quiet moment in a hotel room, one of them puts on an Aznavour record. Lo and behold, Aznavour appears in the room to serenade the would-be lovers.

    Next, he cast Anna Karina, the beautiful 1960s actress who became Jean-Luc Godard's muse and appeared in many of his seminal films, including "Vivre sa vie," "Band of Outsiders," "Alphaville" and "Pierrot le Fou."

    Finally, in a tiny cameo, he cast New Wave director Agnes Varda, whose "Cleo from 5 to 7" is a New Wave classic, and whose "The Gleaners and I" is one of last year's best films. 

    While Varda appears in only one shot, Demme says her haunting eyes had just the right menacing tone for a particular scene in a deserted market. 

    "But it was also a little gift to those who might recognize her," he adds.

    Aside from paying homage to those favorites, Demme also wanted an excuse to work again with Newton, who starred in 1998's underrated "Beloved." He says he was convinced she could carry a modern-day piece much better than the period character in Beloved.

    "I wanted to get closer to what she's really like, which is the Regina Lampert character. She's got a big heart, she's courageous, she's smart, she's funny and she's charming. I felt very strongly about it," he says. "There's that Svengali wannabe that lives inside filmmakers that says. 'If I were the one who directed Thandie's first contemporary movie, I'd have another "There's Something About Mary." ' "

    In addition to the French co-stars and the Zambia-born Newton, Demme cast African-American Lisa Gay Hamilton ("Beloved") and Cleveland native Ted Levine ("The Silence of the Lambs") in the movie as shady characters who may or may not be villains.

    He says, "One thing you notice about 'Charade' is that it's the whitest movie you've ever seen in your life, which was consistent with the times. But what appeals to me was that we'd be able to do a real global community cast of actors."

    Demme's biggest find was the brilliant Korean actor Park Joong-hoon: "I saw Park playing Agent Woo in 'Nowhere to Hide' at Sundance two years ago. I thought, 'Oh my god! He can be in my movie!' "

    To top off "The Truth About Charlie's" cast, Demme chose Wahlberg to play the leading man, Joshua Peters, whom Demme sees as a reflection of himself.

    A goofy, happy-go-lucky guy in love with the world, Demme calls him "a very fish-out-of-water guy who goes to Paris and puts on a beret and learns the pleasantries, but never will fit in."

HOLLYWOOD (AP) - With his deadpan voice, it's hard to tell if Mark Wahlberg (news) is pulling your leg. 

But he says while making "The Truth About Charlie" in France, he had to follow French custom and was "required to basically drink a bottle of wine at lunch everyday. It didn't make it easy to keep up for the second half of the day." 

"The Truth About Charlie," which opens on Friday, is based on the classic movie, "Charade," which stars Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. "Charade," which was released in 1963, was directed by Stanley Donen (news). In that film, a woman in Paris is pursued by several men who want money they claim was stolen by her dead husband. Hepburn's character never knows who to trust and Grant's name is never the same. 

Wahlberg says he was careful to not try to be like the suave Grant in the film. 

"We did the complete opposite," he said. 

After all, movie fans retain affection for Stanley Donen's 1963 comic thriller primarily for the cheeky byplay between Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. The less closely you examine the creaky plot, the better.

For "The Truth about Charlie," Demme inherits the story without the stars, which is kind of like getting a latte minus the espresso and then showing your versatility with foam. Unlike Grant and Hepburn, Mark Wahlberg and Thandie Newton can't automatically claim the audience's love from frame one.

The director's approach is to dim the spotlight on the pair so you're paying as much attention to the supporting characters (always a Demme strength) and the film's visual and aural textures. In fact, "Charlie" hinges on a particular conceit: Demme has sought to remake a movie originally set in early-'60s Paris in the style of the French new-wave filmmakers thriving at the time.

Francois Truffaut's pop gangster film "Shoot the Piano Player" is a particular touchstone: Demme not only inserts snippets of the film, but its star, Charles Aznavour, pops up sporadically and surreally to croon romantic tunes for the would-be lovers. The end credits also include a shot of Truffaut's grave.

Actually, aside from a certain visual energy and the lingering promise of surprise, the two films have little in common. "Shoot the Piano Player" carries a significant emotional weight. Even when "The Truth About Charlie" gets down to life and death, it's liable to float off with the next breeze.

See, there's that matter of story...

Newton plays Regina Lambert, an Englishwoman who, upon returning home to Paris from vacation in Martinique, discovers that her husband of three months, whom she was planning to divorce, is dead and her apartment has been cleared out. Already, the viewers have been thrown more information than they can process quickly.

For instance, knowing that she's been married only three months, why should we sympathize with her flirting with Wahlberg's hunky character, Joshua Peters, who chats her up by a pool?

Demme has made a strategic error right out of the gate: Instead of wanting to see these two attractive people together, we're inclined to judge them badly. The way the movie rushes through their initial exchange also doesn't help; if we don't admire Joshua like Regina does, we suspect she's a fool for wanting him to hang around.

Regina soon learns that her husband, Charlie (Stephen Dillane), actually traveled under several different aliases and passports, and stole a big chunk of change. Three of Charlie's tough-looking former associates (Joong-Hoon Park, Lisa Gay Hamilton and Ted Levine) are after the money and assume Regina has it.

Meanwhile, a female French detective (Christine Boisson) is tracking Regina as a possible murder suspect, and an American intelligence officer named Mr. Bartholomew (Tim Robbins) is counseling Regina in ducking her pursuers and finding the money herself. All the while Joshua hovers around Regina like some guardian angel with a sweet smile and rippling bod.

Hepburn comparisons aside, Newton is perfectly charming, showing a light touch that roles in "Beloved," "Mission: Impossible 2" and "Besieged" haven't allowed her. Wahlberg is more problematic because his screen personality runs to the recessive side. He pulls off dapper just fine, but he can't shake loose his basic earnestness to make room for a dashing hint of danger.

In the other key role, Robbins seems to be paying wry tribute to Walter Matthau's original turn as Mr. Bartholomew, employing a similarly flattened-out drawl and seeming on the constant verge of a wink. It's a self-amused performance that further makes us wonder why Regina keeps trusting people who seem off-kilter.

Still, it's nice to see Demme tapping into his loopy side again ("Something Wild," "Married to the Mob") after more than a decade of heaviness ("The Silence of the Lambs," "Philadelphia," "Beloved"). Longtime Demme collaborator Tak Fujimoto's camerawork, much of it handheld, is vibrant, the settings are eye-grabbing, and you could spend the entire movie just appreciating the expressive faces viewed in passing. As usual the music reflects Demme's eclectic good taste, frequently suggesting the intersection of cha-cha and hip-hop.

But so much activity has a wearying effect when in support of increasingly mundane thriller machinations.

Demme never gets the serious elements to jell with the playful ones, as the excruciatingly drawn-out climax in the rain - a pointed-gun showdown that Demme stages like a pacifist John Woo - makes painfully clear. Demme gets a lot of flavor and spice into his "Charade" remake, but he can't disguise that he's spiffing up leftovers that aren't so substantial or fresh.

2 1/2 stars (out of 4)
"The Truth about Charlie" 

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 24 (UPI) -- Jonathan Demme is not the most linear of thinkers. The nearly five minute-long speech he bumbled through when accepting his Best Director award for "Silence of the Lambs" remains perhaps the single most incoherent performance in Oscar history. It seems only fitting that Demme directed the Talking Heads' 1984 film "Stop Making Sense."

Still, there's much to be said for illogic when it comes bundled with Demme's abundant supply of zigzag lightning in the brain. With its sensational editing and perfect camera angles, "Stop Making Sense" may be the only rock concert movie that ever kept large audiences in their seats (or dancing in the aisles) all the way through. 

Demme has also delivered wildly inventive comedies like "Melvin and Howard" and "Something Wild." In the 1990s though, he got bogged down with two leaden victimist dramas: the AIDS story "Philadelphia" and the Oprah Winfrey-Toni Morrison flop "Beloved."

In "The Truth About Charlie," Demme tries to climb out of this hole he has dug for himself by building his movie on a wacky what-if conceit. Remember that glossy 1963 romantic comedy-thriller "Charade," with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in a preposterous but well-crafted Hollywood crowd-pleaser about intrigue in Paris? Well, what if "Charade" had instead been made by Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard or one of the other Parisian New Wave directors of 1963?

These days, though, the demand in America for tributes to French cultural icons is nigh on nonexistent. The French joke has replaced the Polish joke as America's favorite ethnic slur. To be acclaimed a wit, just mention the French surrendering in World War II, or not bathing, or admiring Jerry Lewis. Try it. It's easy!

Yet, as the late Richard Grenier pointed out in Commentary, the New Wave auteurs were actually quite pro-American during their best years. Starting out as lowly film critics in the 1950s, these ambitious young men on the make realized that their stairway to fame was clogged by an older generation of French pro-Soviet intellectuals, such as Jean-Paul Sartre. So, to distinguish themselves from these Moscow-worshippers, Truffaut and Godard worshipped Hollywood, especially John Wayne movies.

When new President Charles DeGaulle started handing out cultural subsidies in 1958, the boys moved up to making exciting little movies in an aggressively casual style, using jagged editing, improvised dialogue, ramshackle lighting, and self-conscious references to earlier movies.

So, is remaking "Charade" in the manner of "The 400 Blows" or "Breathless" another one of Demme's strokes of genius? Sadly, no. "The Truth About Charlie" is fairly awful -- inept, unfunny, and pointless.

Why? "Charade" resembles last year's "Ocean's Eleven" -- a piece of fluff with no justification other than its transcendent professionalism. 

But what a refutation of the French auteur theory "Charade" is! The director, Stanley Donen of "Singing in the Rain" fame, is no slouch, but look at all the other talent involved. Cary Grant is No. 2 on the American Film Institute's list of male screen legends, and Audrey Hepburn is No. 3 on the distaff side.

Then there's the supporting cast: Walter Matthau, James Coburn, and George Kennedy, each an Oscar winner. And the score was by Henry Mancini during that short spell when he was the most exciting film composer ever.

Strip away all this glamour and expertise, and you are left with a nearly incomprehensible storyline about a woman who learns her late husband stole a lot of money from his scary cohorts and now they want it back. 

The New Wave is notoriously not new anymore. Its innovations have become so widespread that "Charlie," with its jerky handheld cameras and sickly lighting, will remind audiences more of an episode of "Cops" than of "Alphaville."

There's no point in criticizing stars Mark Wahlberg ("Planet of the Apes") and Thandie Newton ("MI-2") for not being Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. Demme, though, is too busy amusing himself with tiny in-jokes -- such as having various elderly actorss from New Wave classics make cameo appearances -- to ensure that his stars look attractive. He introduces Wahlberg with a shot from below that emphasizes the beefcake's burgeoning jowls. And Demme largely ignores Newton's exquisite profile in favor of driver's-license quality mug shots highlighting the bags under her eyes. 

Having Newton play the heroine as a complete ninny doesn't help either.

Demme says, "Paris is (now) a much more overtly diverse city. We really played to that." His fascination with multiculturalism was a major asset in 1986's "Something Wild," but 16 years later, it's old news. Worse, focusing on what's no longer French about Paris makes the City of Light look like a host of other multiethnic big cities, such as London or Toronto. "Charade" was set in the "Paris!" of dreams. In "The Truth About Charlie," though, Paris looks more like "Sydney on the Seine."

There have been too many 're's in the movie industry lately. There have been a plethora of remakes, a gaggle of revisions and even a few pitiful reimagineerings. I've grow sick and tired of seeing my favorite movies raped continually by a generation of incompetent filmmakers. 

Sigh—one of my all time favorite movies, "Charade," starring the fantastic Audrey Hepburn, was remade, revisioned or however you want to put it into the new movie "The Truth About Charlie." But this try ends up good, borderline exceptional. The sigh of exasperation becomes a sigh of relief. 

Jonathan Demme, renowned director of Academy Award winning "Silence of the Lams" and "Philadelphia," was able to fuse the witty charm and allure of the original with an ambitious and daring mix of New Wave cinematography. The final product is a hip, upbeat, cosmopolitan film that encompasses some of the best features of old and new cinema. 

"The Truth About Charlie" starts as Regina Lambert (Thandie Newton), comes home to her Paris apartment from holiday to discover that her husband has been murdered and that a group of very dangerous people are after something her husband stole from them. Having no idea her husband was a thief, much less what he might have stolen, Regina desperately finds aid of a mysterious American Joshua Peters (Mark Wahlberg). 

The film from there takes the viewers on a rollercoaster ride of twists and turns that leaves the audience gasping for more. This isn't some cheesy suspense thriller. Although some scenes seem to intentionally lay the fromage on, every twist and every turn in "The Truth About Charlie" is delightful. 

Demme has created a lively, livid, fully entertaining experience. He recreates Paris beautifully and opening an exciting subculture of intricate intrigue that's hypnotic and intoxicating. The world of Paris with every dark alley, gaudy Ferris wheel and broken, rusted, metal elevator is so alive the audience feels it and lives in it with the characters. 

The movie perfectly balances intrigue, comedy and suspense in turn, creating a multidimensionally pleasing experience. Every aspect of the film, whether it be the mystery of where Peter's alliegence may lie to the humorous interactions Regina has with Tim Robbins' character add to the creative ambiguity of the film. Love, humor, good and evil all get turned on their head in this twisted fun romp through the infinite imagination of Demme. 

Demme is a fantastic director. He has boldly stepped aside from his mastery of traditional films like "Silence of the Lambs" and had ventured into the world of New Wave cinema on the heels of such trailblazing young directors as Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson. "The Truth About Charlie" is a testament that this traditional American director can radically change his directorial approach, entering into an entirely new style of moviemaking. 

Demme decided to do a remake of "Charade" because of Thandie Newton. After working with Newton in "Beloved" he wanted to create a movie that would have a character that was really like her in real life. Demme was right, Newton is perfect for the role. 

The cinematography of the film was fantastic. Jarring camera shots from one profile to the next heightened the anxiety in tense moments, and silent surreal shots of the lighted Eiffel tower gave the film an eerily romantic tone. Chalked full of visual juxtapositions the film is engaging and provocative. 

Is this remake, revision, reimganeering, better than the original? No, but it's wildly different and stands alone as an entertaining, fun film. Stay for the credits, watch Demme's imagination unfold and sigh when it's over because movies this good don't come around that often. 

Once more, it all boils down to the stamps -- which, if you have seen Stanley Donen's 1963 comic-thriller Charade, nearly ruins the last 10 minutes of Jonathan Demme's remake, The Truth About Charlie. But Demme isn't at all concerned with such mundane things as shock-'em finales; he won't be bound by the stultifying convention that insists a film's ending must provide its most gratifying moments. Revelations and rewards aren't his game; his game is his game, meaning Demme loves the making of movies, not finishing them. Which is what makes The Truth About Charlie such a rush: For the first time in a long time, the 58-year-old writer-director is having a blast, and thank God; his last two dramatic features, Philadelphia and Beloved, were so static that watching them was like flipping through somebody else's dreary photo album. Charlie doesn't have a point, doesn't give a damn about giving a damn. It is what it is: a beautiful goof, a drunken supermodel in search of one more party before the sun comes up.

Donen and writer Peter Stone's beloved original was less about the hunt for The Truth -- a dead husband named Charlie, his hunted widow Regina, missing money, thieves and double agents lurking in Parisian shadows -- than it was a star vehicle for a middle-aged Cary Grant and a younger Audrey Hepburn. Donen and Stone were having too good a time mocking the genre, then the provenance of the lecherous James Bond, while riffing on the disparity between the actors' ages -- Grant was 59, Hepburn a mere 34. As Bruce Eder points out in his liner notes to the Criterion Collection DVD, Charade possessed "an elegance more akin to a '50s romance than a '60s thriller" because of its stars, and even now we watch Charade not because it's a great movie, but because, with Grant and Hepburn as our tour guides, it feels like one. 

Demme wanted to remake Charade to give Beloved's Thandie Newton a vehicle worthy of her estimable and thus far underutilized charms -- she's as graceful talking as she is walking, though you'd never know it from John Woo's clumsy M:I-2 -- and to make his own nouvelle vague movie on the same Parisian boulevards captured in the fierce and feverish works of François Truffaut, Jean Renoir and Agnès Varda. The latter is why his film is stocked with references to Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, and why it's loaded with appearances by such French New Wave icons as singer Charles Aznavour (star of Piano Player, and stealer of scenes here), Anna Karina (ex-wife of Jean-Luc Godard, who cast her in such films as A Woman Is a Woman) and Varda herself, director of Cleo From 5 to 7. 

Their proximity to a revolution has brushed off on Demme, who zigs and zags and drags his camera through Paris with an abandon he hasn't displayed since his days toiling on the Roger Corman assembly line or shooting Something Wild. Demme will often go on a tangent, giving us digital-video flashbacks of events that never occurred; we're in the heads of our characters, witnessing their rampant imaginations. And he will drop in characters who aren't even there: Aznavour moans on the soundtrack, when suddenly he's standing next to Thandie Newton and Mark Wahlberg, serenading them in a hotel room. But Demme never takes us out of the movie; in fact, all his tricks only draw us in further. We're leaning in, savoring the moment when a filmmaker has faith enough in himself, and his audience, to allow the small detours to become the best part of the trip. 

But this is as much Newton's picture as it is Demme's; she's in nearly every frame, and her echo resonates in the handful of scenes in which she doesn't appear. It's little wonder every character -- from Wahlberg's Joshua Peters, the beret-sporting American whose concern for Newton's Regina elicits only suspicion, to Christine Boisson's sardonic, chain-smoking police commandant -- falls for her; she seduces by accidennt, by just opening her mouth (at times, she sounds very much like Hepburn) or furrowing her brow. Demme, the rare male director to frame women in the center of the screen, never allows her to play victim or fool; Newton's being pursued, by alleged government officials (a wonderful Tim Robbins, channeling Walter Matthau's sleazy charm) and a multiculti trio of would-be baddies (including Silence of the Lambs' Ted Levine, huffing and puffing), but you never worry for Regina. She's stronger and smarter than all of her shadows -- sexier, too, which counts for everything when you're being passed around the dance floor while Anna Karina coos/croaks from the nearby stage. 

If there's anything wrong with The Truth About Charlie, it's Wahlberg, who seems confused about who or what he is -- bad guy, or just bad actor. Everyone else looks like they're having a blast; he appears to be just keeping pace, catching his breath. You keep wishing he were, oh, Matt Damon or Brad Pitt, someone more elegant, who doesn't vanish when standing next to Newton. Then again, that's probably impossible. 

Jonathan Demme says the only person surprised by his casting of Mark Wahlberg in "The Truth About Charlie” -- the director's remake of "Charade,” which starred Cary Grant -- was ... Mark Wahlberg.

"Early on, Mark was like, ‘Are you sure? Me? Playing Cary Grant?' And I was like, ‘Mark, you're not playing Cary Grant. You're playing a character rewritten to suit you,'” Demme said Tuesday at the Walter Reade Theater, where he hosted a "Charlie” screening attended by stars Thandie Newton and Tim Robbins, as well as Susan Sarandon, Elizabeth Shue, Holly Hunter and Natasha Richardson.

"Mark Wahlberg is the anti-Cary Grant,” said the Baldwin-born Demme. "I had a T-shirt with a picture of Cary with a red-line going through it when we were in Paris. I wanted Mark to understand that he was supposed to be his own whole new version of this character. Forget Cary Grant. In fact, maybe that should have been the title.”

Attracting Newton to the role of Regina, first played by Audrey Hepburn, was a more subtle enterprise. Demme invited the 29-year-old Brit to his Nyack home, where she thought she was just having one of her regular dinners with the director and his family.

"She had no idea what I was doing. I took her down to the basement, said ‘Let's whip in an old flick' and we laughed our way through ‘Charade,'” Demme recalled. "Afterward, I said ‘This would be a cool picture to remake, wouldn't it?' And she just laughed adorably and left the room.”

Said Newton: "I'm always babysitting his kids, and I thought this was just one of those times. There didn't seem to be anything unusual about just watching an old movie with him.”