Joe Gould’s Secret. 2000. USA. Directed by Stanley Tucci. Screenplay by Howard A. Rodman, based on the New Yorker articles by Joseph Mitchell. With Tucci, Ian Holm, Patricia Clarkson. 35mm. 104 min.
Ellen Lewis’s third collaboration as casting director with actor-director Stanley Tucci, Joe Gould’s Secret is an endearingly thoughtful adaptation of Joseph Mitchell’s New Yorker profile of an eccentric bohemian writer whom he had befriended in the late 1930s. Gould, as we discover, had spent the better part of a quarter century scribbling down observations of street life in thousands of little black notebooks with an eye—and ear—toward creating a magisterial “Oral History of Our Time.” Their complicated yet tender relationship is beautifully limned by the always excellent Ian Holm as Gould and Tucci himself as Mitchell, the well-bred North Carolinian who finds himself at a loss for words in the presence of such a loquacious force.