It’s a remake of the terrific 1963 Stanley Donen film CHARADE starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, which I reviewed here back in 2002. In this version, Thandie Newton plays the Hepburn character, a woman named Regina who recently married a mysterious man named Charles (Stephen Dillane). She returns home from a holiday to find their apartment gutted and empty, and her husband murdered. Regina (in this version, she hates being called Reggie) is shocked to discover Charlie led many lives and had a secret; a fortune he and four others had stolen and hidden away and had yet to reclaim. The three surviving members of the gang think Regina has the money, though she’s no clue where it could be. The final piece of the puzzle is a kind stranger named Joshua Peters (Mark Wahlberg in the Grant role) who seems a little too glad to help Regina out of her troubles.

Aside from a few name changes (Grant’s character was named Peter Joshua), and an altered ending that allows for a cute parody of director Jonathan Demme’s SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, the two films are nearly identical in construction. But where CHARADE was (and remains) a dazzling comic thriller, as light on its feet as Donen’s frequent collaborator Gene Kelly, THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE is arduous and plodding. Demme wanted to make the film so he could work in Paris and pay homage to his heroes of the French New Wave, so why does the movie feels so dour when it should be playful? Watching CHARLIE, I wondered if given the opportunity to remake one of the New Wave films he loved if he’d turn them down because you can’t improve on the perfection of something like BREATHLESS. I suspect he would.

Despite their age difference, Grant and Hepburn had great on-screen chemistry. Newton and Wahlberg aren’t bad, they just don’t fit together. They got a lot of flack for not measuring up to the stars of the original, but of course no one could measure up to the stars of the original. I like the idea of recasting the gang with a more international flavor, but couldn’t they have picked some actors with charisma? None of them do anything to erase the memories of James Coburn and George Kennedy in these roles. Still, the person who I was most frustrated with in this version was costume designer Catherine Leterrier, who sticks Wahlberg in a series of hideous hats that only make him look like a little boy playing dressup in his dad’s clothes. I can’t decide what looked worse: Wahlberg in a beret, or Wahlberg in a fedora. These hats were out of fashion when the first film was made! Why not just give him a trucker hat and make him look really silly?

I tried judging the film on its own merits, but even that is impossible. Universal Studios packaged CHARLIE with the original CHARADE, inviting unflattering comparisons when they should be dodging them. After slogging through CHARLIE I flipped the disc over and watched the original, and was charmed by it all over again. The side-by-side viewings really made me appreciate the nuances of Grant’s versatile performance, along with clever small touches like the nifty opening credits sequence. I suppose the idea of packaging the two together was a marketing move to offer the buyer a better value, but the result is a set in which the supplemental material blows the feature out of the water.