Film

Joe Gould's Secret (2000)

Director: Stanley Tucci

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Joseph Mitchell encountered Joe Gould, an eccentric, erudite tramp, drunk and rogue, in the 1940s, and later wrote about him in two beguiling, time-separated investigative essays for the New Yorker. The pieces asked whether the bum's claim to have composed, in the form of a massive unpublished oral history, one of the most profoundly important books of all time held up to inspection. The tale had colourful characters, decent themes - fame and neglect; loyalty, faith and betrayal; creativity and destructivenes - and the ring of truth. Tucci's well-meaning but staid simplification is clumsily sentimental, with a horribly indulged 'larger than life' turn from Holm as the boho derelict, who, incidentally, is one of the most fragrantly clean tramps ever to grace a cinema screen. After The Impostors, this calls into question the promise shown by Tucci (or was it Campbell Scott after all?) with Big Night.

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