Academy Award-winning director Jonathan Demme has good reason to have his fingers crossed Friday when his The Truth About Charlie opens. After all, the updated reworking of the 1963 classic romantic thriller Charade has Mark Wahlberg stepping into Cary Grant's revered shoes and Thandie Newton reprising Audrey Hepburn's likable expatriate in Paris. 

Following critical and box office disappointments of recent remakes —Swept Away has brought in only $553,102 since opening Oct. 11 and The Four Feathers has grossed only $17.8 million since its release Sept. 20 — the pressure to succeed is definitely on for Charlie. And for its stars and directors. 

"Neither Wahlberg nor Demme's last films were hits, and the trick is to have some hits mixed in there," says Paul Dergarabedian, president of box office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc. 

Demme's last film, 1998's Beloved, made a meager $22.8 million. Wahlberg's most recent film, Rock Star, didn't sing, pulling in just $17 million. Dergarabedian says: "As for Thandie Newton (Beloved), she hasn't had a hit of her own, so this film could be the one she's looking for. All three have a lot at stake. 

Hollywood persists in remaking classics, despite mixed results. It's a "reflex of laziness," says Andrew Sarris, film critic, author and film professor at New York's Columbia University.

"You can't bring back Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. Even with those two, the plot of Charade was just serviceable. Charade wasn't great, it was sort of low-grade Hitchcock," he says. 

Early buzz has not been promising. "I don't think interest is all that high for the film," Gitesh Pandya of Boxofficeguru.com says. 

Charlie's journey to the big screen has been a long time coming. Demme, who won an Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs, originally wanted Will Smith in the Grant role. But by the time the script was completed, Smith was committed to Ali. Demme always wanted Newton as the Hepburn stand-in. 

Besides casting setbacks, rewriting and updating the script was problematic. Jessica Bendinger, who scripted the teen comedy Bring It On, was originally brought in by Universal, the studio releasing the film. But another of the credited Charlie screenwriters, Steve Schmidt, acknowledges that the Bendinger/Demme teaming "was a collaboration not to Jonathan's liking." 

Further raising suspicions is a credited writer named Peter Joshua, which also happens to be one of the aliases Grant used in the original. Demme says, "Peter Joshua is Peter Stone (screenwriter of Charade), who was too modest to have his name appear twice in the credits." However, other Charlie insiders say that 72-year-old Stone's supposed modesty was more a case of embarrassment in being associated with the update. 

At a few early screenings, some moviegoers have erupted in laughter during dramatic moments. "Much of the dialogue seemed out of place, with a '50s or '60s flair, but doesn't work in a film with a contemporary setting," says Michael Kyrioglou, 39, who attended a Charlie screening last month in Washington, D.C. 

"This is a movie that is supposed to be fun in every way, including watching Mark Wahlberg as a fish out of water," Demme says. "It took me a while to realize how funny it is because it's not really a comedy, but the movie really has an aggressive sense of humor." 

Still, the final judgment will come from audiences who, says Dergarabedian, might be ready for Charlie. "There is a place for this film. People who have seen the trailer are interested, and it's different enough from anything else out there. Wahlberg can pull in an audience; young women come in droves for him. Planet of the Apes wasn't loved by critics, but it had a huge opening." 

AUSTIN - When you interview Jonathan Demme, the Oscar-winning director of The Silence of the Lambs will offer you a snack from a hotel tray of fruit and cookies. He will politely answer your film-geek questions about the sound effects in his films. He will jot down notes when you raise a point that interests him.

The one thing Demme will not do is agree when you suggest that he's among the most influential American filmmakers working today.

"It's weird enough to me that I actually make movies for a living," he says during a recent stop in Austin for a benefit screening of his latest film, The Truth About Charlie. "But to see my work as influencing others, or in the context of other filmmakers' works, that's too abstract."

Fair enough. But hasn't Demme noticed, for instance, how the films of Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Punch-Drunk Love) mix up the violent but deeply humanist comedy of Demme's Something Wild with the fluky pop mythmaking of Melvin and Howard? Doesn't he see his own style emulated in the works of Alexander Payne (Election), Miguel Arteta (The Good Girl) and Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich)?

"I watch these movies as a consumer and I think they're great," he says. "But it's hard for me to abstract myself."

Let's put it another way. Jonathan Demme -- the man who got his start making exploitation movies for Roger Corman and who went on to make the alternative-culture classic Stop Making Sense -- has become an eminence grise of the American cinema. Even though he would still prefer to see himself not as the powerful old man but as the wide-eyed young hipster.

His youthful energy has never been more evident than in The Truth About Charlie, which opens Friday. It's a remake of the 1963 Stanley Donen classic Charade. Demme stuck close to the plot of the original, in which a beautiful woman (Thandie Newton in the Audrey Hepburn part) whose husband has just been murdered falls in love with a mysterious man (Mark Wahlberg taking over for Cary Grant) who may or may not be trying to harm her.

But viewers expecting a straight-up romantic thriller are going to be surprised. Demme has jettisoned Donen's highly polished, realist approach for a bouncy, occasionally surreal ode to the French new-wave cinema of the 1950s and 1960s.

"It's a conceit," Demme explains. "This idea that, when Stanley Donen was in Paris shooting this high-style, elegant, Hollywood glossy romantic thriller, on exactly the same days you might have also had Agnes Varda or Francois Truffaut or Jean-Luc Godard out there, with their hand-held cameras."

In The Truth About Charlie, Demme actualizes that conceit -- by having the star of Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, Charles Aznavour, suddenly appear onscreen, entirely unexplained, sitting at a piano in a hotel room, crooning a song. Or by having the movie stop cold so that we can observe the nightclub act of Anna Karina, the star of Godard's A Woman Is a Woman. All the people who epitomized Paris' youth culture in the early 1960s seem to have wound their way into the same movie 40 years later -- a movie done in the same style (jump-cut editing, hand-held camerawork, bizarre flashbacks and fantasy sequences) as French new-wave pictures like Breathless or Band of Outsiders.

It's the sort of work you might expect a young man to make -- one just out of film school and determined to pay tribute to every movie on his Film History 101 syllabus. Indeed, perhaps one of the reasons Demme has a hard time acknowledging his influence upon others is that he's too busy acknowledging the influence of others on him. He says that Martin Scorsese's 1973 film Mean Streets still inspires him. As do a whole new generation of international filmmakers.

"You look at the movies by Wong Kar-wai [In the Mood for Love] and Lars von Trier [Dancer in the Dark.] Here are people making great pictures, and they are breaking all the rules again. They're taking us right back to Godard."

Born on Long Island in 1944, Demme grew up in Miami. Living in London in the late 1960s, he earned money as the "London correspondent" for an American music magazine called Fusion. His break in the movies came through Roger Corman, for whom he eventually directed films like Caged Heat and Fighting Mad. Those twin influences -- music and exploitation cinema -- would reveal themselves in so many of his successive works.

He is, for one thing, widely regarded as one of the most inventive users of popular music in American movies -- someone who often scores entire sequences to the most unexpected of songs. "I just know that's my favorite part of the process," Demme says, "figuring out what songs might work." His experience directing exploitation thrillers paid off in an even more unusual way. In The Silence of the Lambs, his masterpiece, he raised pulp fiction to profound heights; it won five Oscars, including a Best Director prize for Demme.

If there's one thing that links all of Demme's works, it's his gentle, humanist touch -- his love for oddballs and outcasts. "Humanist" is a label that Demme is comfortable with. "I prefer a humanist culture," he says. "That sounds highfalutin. But a lot of what we're sold is anti-human. The excessive gore, the excessive bathroom humor. That's anti-human."

This attitude also probably accounts for the most high-profile decision he has made in recent years -- to not direct Hannibal, after reading Thomas Harris' grotesque novel.

"I stepped away, because -- as is often the case with a writer of Thomas Harris' originality -- he has his own vision," Demme explains. "And he took the character that I loved, Clarice Starling, in a direction that really broke my heart." (Demme says he hasn't seen either Hannibal or the recent Red Dragon and doesn't plan to.)

The Truth About Charlie only Demme's third feature film in the last decade. (His daring, but very flawed, adaptation of Toni Morrison's Beloved was a critical and box-office disappointment in 1998). What has he been doing all this time? Playing the part of eminence grise. He wanted to spend more time with his children, now ages 14, 12 and 7. To keep the cash coming in, he started a production company, which wouldn't require his constant presence on the set. He began producing other directors' films -- including Tom Hanks' That Thing You Do and Spike Jonze's upcoming Adaptation.

Now Demme says he's eager to step up his own creative output. He has already finished shooting a documentary -- titled The Agronomist, about the assassination of Haitian radio journalist Jean Dominique -- that will likely premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

And he will continue to resist the impulse to get serious and grow up. "Maybe it's because the work that I've been doing, in The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia and Beloved, was so serious," he says. "I realize I'd been developing more and more of an itch to break away from that. The Truth About Charlie is the most playful movie that I've made."

Some Demme winners

Jonathan Demme is responsible for some of the most original American movies of the past 25 years, though most moviegoers are familiar with only his box-office successes, The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia. Here's a guide to the other gems in his canon:

Handle With Care (1977) -- An ensemble comedy centered around the phenomenon of CB radios, it plays kind of like a junior version of Robert Altman's Nashville. Worth seeking out, even if it has become somewhat dated.

Melvin and Howard (1980) -- A half-whim-sical/half-melancholy tour of recent American pop history, this fact-based film tells the story of Melvin Dummar (Paul Le Mat), who claimed to be the heir to the fortune of Howard Hughes (Jason Robards). It won Oscars for Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress (Mary Steenburgen).

Stop Making Sense (1984) -- Simply put, it's the greatest rock 'n' roll concert movie ever made: a transfixing, transporting portrait of the Talking Heads in performance. Pay particular attention to David Byrne's dance with a lamp during Naive Melody; rarely have image and sound combined so exquisitely in a film.

Something Wild (1986) -- This story of a free-spirited woman (Melanie Griffith) who kidnaps a repressed yuppie (Jeff Daniels) and takes him to her high school reunion begins as a screwball comedy. Then it abruptly turns into a brutal and terrifying thriller before finally arriving at a place of heartbreaking transcendence. Greeted with perplexity by critics and indifference by audiences, it has since taken its rightful place on the short list of great American movies of the 1980s.

Married to the Mob (1988) -- An off-the-wall mobster spoof, this is probably the slightest movie Demme has made. But Michelle Pfeiffer has never been more relaxed and accessible on-screen, and the supporting cast -- Mercedes Ruehl, Dean Stockwell and Allec Baldwin (as Frank "The Cucumber" DeMarco) -- is a hoot.

"I like the idea of remakes," says director Jonathan Demme, speaking recently at a roundtable interview in Los Angeles about his new film, The Truth About Charlie, which is a remake of the Aundrey Hepburn/Cary Grant 1963 classic Charade.

The Oscar-winning director came to this project after a commercial bomb (1998's Beloved), as well as turning down the chance to direct the sequel to his biggest hit, The Silence of the Lambs: "I didn't do Hannibal because I'm too in love with the character of Clarice Starling, and when I saw this extraordinarily bold direction that Thomas Harris took my girl – even as I kind of applaud his audacity – I was heartbroken. I didn't want to tell that story."

Instead, Demme wanted to do a light, playful romantic thriller – and found in the original Charade the perfect vehicle, even though it meant remaking a film by one of his idols, director Stanley Donen. "I didn't meet with him – I called him up on the telephone, [and] it was a very weird phone call," Demme recalls. "I'm calling one of my heroes, one of the great cinema masters, to find out if it's okay to remake one of his classics. But he made it very easy. It was a two-minute phone call."

Once he had Donen's blessing, Demme launched into a take on the storyline that was inspired by the films of the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), a longtime love of the director's. What is it about the films of the New Wave that inspired Demme so much? "Shoot the Piano Player, which I actually get to salute in this picture, is the one that really opened the door for me. That was the first New Wave movie I saw. I was very young, one of those tragic kids who spends more time in movie theaters than on the football field, and I'd seen foreign films. And I understood that it was like an American gangster movie, except it was set in France. Then this moment occurs, where the gangster says to the policeman: 'I swear to God I'm telling the truth – if I'm lying, may my mother drop dead.' And in this deeply serious movie, it cuts to a room and there's this old lady and she clutches her chest and she crashes to the floor! Then it cuts back and the cop says, 'Okay, you can go.' And I was like, 'What just happened there?!' That excited me a lot."
  
Demme also admits that he was "stimulated and excited by non-traditional visual approaches in movies that have been influenced by the Nouvelle Vague like Wong-Kar Wei's films and even Doug Liman's Go and, thirty years ago, Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets."

As well, tackling a remake of Charade gave him the chance to play with the iconic pairing of Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant by casting Thandie Newton (with whom Demme had previously worked in Beloved) and Mark Wahlberg.

"I saw a great vehicle for Thandie Newton that could really introduce this incredible young actress who can hold her own with any actress out there," says Demme. "There was never any question of anyone else playing the part." As for Wahlberg, Demme recalls with a laugh: "I had a T-shirt that had a picture of Cary Grant and a big red circle with a line through his face! I told him to forget Cary Grant. I referred to Mark as the 'Anti-Cary Grant.' People said, 'This would be great for George Clooney,' and I was like, 'Well, yeah, if you want to get into a contest' – you know, can Clooney do Cary Grant? But that didn't interest me – as a consumer it would interest me to see that, but as a filmmaker I didn't want to do that."

Although Demme is ready for natural comparisons between Charade and The Truth About Charlie, he sums up by saying, "There's nothing blasphemous or sacred in remakes. I've only seen Dr. Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, but if I ever decide to see Dr. Lecter movies, I'd love to see a double feature of Manhunter and Red Dragon.

"We were talking about remakes not too long ago," Demme concludes, "and whether something was too sacred to ever be remade. Someone said, 'Citizen Kane!' And then the next second, I have to tell you, I thought to myself, 'Oh yeah? You wouldn't want to see Spike Lee's Citizen Kane? Okay. But I do!'"

"The Truth About Charlie" is that people are either going to love it or hate it.

No one will take a middle position - the film is too extreme in its approach. It may simply be too hip for the house.

At its core, Jonathan Demme has remade 1963's mystery-romance, "Charade," with Thandie Newton and Mark Wahlberg in the roles originally played by Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant.

Newton is Regina Lambert, who discovers at the start that her husband has been murdered. She soon learns he led a double life, entangled with mercenaries, spies and missing millions in ill-gotten money.

Now those mercenaries are after Regina, convinced she holds the cash. Wahlberg plays Joshua, who comes to Regina's rescue. Or does he?

The lovely Newton brings a perfect balance of innocence and sophistication as the determined Regina. It's a performance that alternately echoes and distances itself from Hepburn's. The rough-hewn but appealing Wahlberg offers quite a different Joshua than Grant, but it's just as effective.

In recounting the story, Demme sidesteps any conventional clone-like remake and pulls out all the imagination stops.

Instead of aping the glossy Hitchcockian style of original director Stanley Donan, Demme uses "The Truth About Charlie" and its Parisian setting as the perfect opportunity to pay homage to all things French. That includes the New Wave, the innovative Gallic filmmakers of the '50s who were such an influence on Demme's generation.

The homage is found in both technique (the energetic, almost-dizzying hand-held camera movement, the use of bright primary colors, and the fast-paced editing) and in personnel.

"Charlie" is peppered with more French film icons than Paris has champagne corks.

Charles Aznavour ("Shoot the Piano Player") and Anna Karina (the films of Jean-Luc Godard) each show up at different times to sing songs in on-screen cameos. Aznavour's appearance is positively mythic.

Agnes Varda ("Vagabonds") and Magali Noel ("Rififi") also make brief appearances. And the film's final shot - after the end credits - is the grave of the New Wave's greatest director, Francois Truffaut.

So, the first hint you may not enjoy "Charlie" is if you don't know who Truffaut is, or if you think the French New Wave is a hairstyle, or if you're not adventurous as a filmgoer.

Actually, Demme gave a hint early in his career that he might one day emulate the New Wave. His offbeat 1986 comedy "Something Wild" foreshadows "Charlie's" Gallic style.

But Demme also emulates more modern film styles - including those found in "Run Lola Run" - and showcases today's modern and multi-ethnic Paris. There's a French-Algerian cop, and a racial mix on the streets, in the shops and in his central love story.

Flavoring the narrative is the best world music soundtrack ever heard, mingling sounds of North Africa, with Parisian cafes and dance halls.

Maybe I enjoyed "The Truth About Charlie" simply because I sensed the exuberance of its creators.

Truffaut once wrote, "I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I'm not interested in all those films that do not pulse."

"The Truth About Charlie" pulses like crazy.

"The Truth About Charlie" is all style, no substance -- but, oh, what style!

How could it be otherwise? The movie is, in director Jonathan Demme's words, "the loving stepchild" of the 1963 Cary Grant-Audrey Hepburn charmer "Charade," which traded in large part upon the charm of its stars. 

Demme's motivations had to do with everything but story -- a light vehicle to showcase the gorgeous Thandie Newton, a chance to film in Paris, a desire to merge French New Wave sensibilities with the frenetic modern style of filmmaking practiced by Tom Tykwer, Wong Kar-wai and others.

The movie follows the plot line of its predecessor but plays with the relationships. Newton is Regina Lambert, who returns from vacation to find her Paris apartment ransacked and to learn that her husband, Charlie (Stephen Dillane, seen primarily in flashbacks), has been murdered.

A portentous American official, Mr. Bartholomew (Tim Robbins), tells her what she didn't know about her husband and about how some of the dead man's former colleagues (played by Ted Levine, Joong-Hoon Park and Lisa Gay Hamilton) are searching for a large amount of money that they believe he owed them. They're sure Regina must know something about it.

Taking it upon himself to protect her is Joshua Peters (Mark Wahlberg), whom she met supposedly by chance while on vacation and who, like her, happens to live in Paris and happens to bump into her just when she needs him.

Obviously, he's not telling her everything. In fact, Regina is one of the few people in the film who turns out to be just whom she says she is. The story goes through its twists and turns -- some of them clever, some of them confusing. One key difference from "Charade": In that one, Hepburn fell head over heels for Grant. In this one, Wahlberg goes goo-goo for Newton -- and who can blame him?

Newton has the grace, beauty and elegance to essay a Hepburn role, but Mark Wahlberg, you're no Cary Grant. Neither is anyone else. Wahlberg may look silly in a beret, but I grew to think of him not as Grant but as an American B-movie baby-faced tough-guy type of the 1940s or '50s -- Elisha Cook Jr. crossed with Richard Jaeckel. That comparison is easier to swallow.

But Demme compensates for the deficiency in savoir-faire from his leading man by putting the sizzle into the look and sound of the film. The movie adores Paris, but not so much the picture-postcard version of the city as its grittier, more intriguing corners. Cinematographer Tak Fujimoto often uses hand-held cameras bulling through scenes as if on amphetamines and infuses the film with energy.

But the references to French New Wave exist not just in cutting techniques but also in homage form. Charles Aznavour, the world-weary crooner who starred in Francois Truffaut's "Shoot the Piano Player," pops up from time to time as if to comment on the action in song. Other icons of the movement -- actress Anna Karina, director Agnes VVarda among them -- get cameos that often have no other purpose but to add atmosphere and offer a salute to the influence of the New Wave.

In other words, "The Truth About Charlie" revels in the pure joy of filmmaking, inviting the audience to enjoy the ride and not worry too much about the mechanics. Sounds good -- and looks good -- to me.

The ferociously talented Thandie Newton is responsible for the film's satisfying fullness. Its emptiness is largely due to a wan Mark Wahlberg.

Directed by Jonathan Demme, The Truth About Charlie is a remake of one of Mr. Demme's personal favorites, 1963's effervescent Charade, which was directed by Stanley Donen and featured Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn at the peak of their star power. The 39-year-old original is shown regularly on cable networks, so it's inevitable that the new film's most receptive viewers will be those who don't know Audrey H. from Katharine H.

Working with Charade screenwriter Peter Stone, Mr. Demme strips some of the banter away from the original. The result is a darker movie, with more dangerous undercurrents than were found in the '63 version. 

The basic plot remains the same: Ms. Newton plays a young widow suspected of knowing the whereabouts of an ill-gotten fortune hidden by her murdered husband. She doesn't know whom to trust, and the mysterious stranger played by Mr. Wahlberg could be either hero or villain.

Director Demme (The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia) spins this tale in the style of the French New Wave that re-invented international filmmaking in the 1960s. The movie is a visual symphony of twirling cameras, fast editing and unexpected camera angles. The script pays homage to mystery capers that both preceded and followed the New Wave, and such French icons as Charles Aznavour and Anna Karina make welcome appearances. For Mr. Demme as well as many moviegoers, the film's persistent visual flair represents a joyous exercise. For others, it may more closely resemble an endurance test.

Probably no actress could duplicate the elfin glamour of Audrey Hepburn, but for Ms. Newton, playing the same role is not such an impossible mission. For starters, she shares with Audrey a mixture of cool elegance and warm vulnerability. She also brings an intuitive intelligence to the table. As in two unjustly neglected films, 1998's Besieged and 1996's The Leading Man, she is required to register many silent reactions. Just watching her think is a delightful experience.

Mr. Wahlberg, sad to say, seems incapable of thought. Mr. Demme and his teammates wisely alternated the dynamics of Charade's leading duo. In the original, Ms. Hepburn was in constant pursuit of suave Mr. Grant. In The Truth About Charlie, Mr. Wahlberg tries to woo the wary Ms. Newton.

But being a convincing lover requires the shedding of abundant self-absorption – a difficult task for any actor and maybe an impossible one for Mr. Wahlberg. The promise of Boogie Nights has yet to be fulfilled.

Otherwise, Tim Robbins does an inspired deadpan turn as a slick official, and Christine Boisson delivers a crisp, sympathetic performance as a humane police commandant.

The Truth About Charlie occupies a Paris not usually captured in cinema. It's a wintry, rainy Paris with only a few token nods to points of tourist interest. Like the film itself, this approach works more often than not, but never as completely as hoped.