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"You won't be safe until that money is in our hands."

Jonathan Demme is a distinguished, consistent filmmaker with an impressively varied collection of credits to his name: from the legendary horror of The Silence of the Lambs to the more populist sentiment of Philadelphia, to Stop Making Sense, perhaps the greatest concert film ever made, Demme's projects are rarely uninteresting and his style is difficult to pin down. With his latest project, the whimsical romance/espionage thriller The Truth About Charlie, Demme veers in the direction of new kids on the block Baz Luhrmann and Guy Ritchie, though he is less aggressive than the former and more thoughtful than the latter. As storytelling, the film is sketchy at best, but as a stylistic exercise, it's dynamic and intriguing, with a wry sense of humor and an expert eye for visual pyrotechnics.

The movie is working from a 1963 Cary Grant-Audrey Hepburn collaboration called Charade, a similarly fleeting movie that is well-known but is on few top-100 lists. It replaces Grant and Hepburn with the significantly less renowned pair of Mark Wahlberg and Thandie Newton, with Newton finally able to cease concealing her British accent. She plays Regina Lampert, a UK citizen living in Paris with her mysteriously wealthy husband of a few months, an alleged art dealer named Charlie. Coming home after a tropical vacation to tell him that she wants a divorce, Regina finds her apartment barren and Charlie nowhere to be found. She later learns that he was found dead in a train station.

It seems that, as usually happens, Charlie is not at all what he made himself out to be. In fact, before he died he stole $6 million dollars in unspecified form (a briefcase full of cash? Diamonds? Stamps?) from a team of very determined and dangerous individuals understandably eager for the return of their hard-earned cash. Enter Joshua Peters (Mark Wahlberg), a charismatic young American who offers loyalty and assistance to the frazzled Regina. She is very fond of him until a phone call drops the not-so-subtle hint that his agenda isn't as squeaky-clean as he would have her believe.

Tim Robbins eventually shows up as a nefarious ODC operative with a military history, who tells Regina that she should trust no one -- least of all Joshua -- and report to him immediately with any new developments. Of course, very few of the characters in this self-consciously twisty little movie turn out to be who they say they are, and the plot refuses to stay put for even a second.

Demme directs the hell out of this thing, throwing quick-cut flashbacks, Chinese zooms, non sequitur Italian crooners (!) and his housecat on the screen with frightful enthusiasm. This is one of those cynical movies where the director could care less whether or not you care or even understand the story he's telling, only whether you are engaged by his heavily stylized workmanship.

I was. The Truth About Charlie's bag of tricks forgoes pointless showiness, opting instead to establish a mood of playfully frenetic suspense. Demme may incur comparisons to Luhrmann and Ritchie, but his work is more organized than either of theirs, his style less distracting and less hollowly bewildering. There is the sense that he is eager to throw story out the window, but we also feel like there is no reason why he shouldn't.

In the midst of all the fireworks, the movie also reveals an extremely dry, halfway-sophisticated sense of humor about its often unintelligible proceedings. The action is often plays for laughs -- one of the climaxes is a literal footrace, through the subway, the streets, and finally a hotel in which the two participants try to Wile E. Coyote each other into pratfalling and losing ground. Then there's that aforementioned Bacharach-style singer who shows up at the most opportune moments.

The actual truth about Charlie may not be nearly as interesting as we would like, but who cares? The film is a hyperactive, exuberant, amusing flight of fancy.