The Invention of Lying (2009)
Joe Williams
'The Invention Of Lying' Los Angeles Premiere - Arrivals
'The Invention Of Lying' Los Angeles Premiere - Red Carpet
Imagine an alternate universe in which everyone always tells the truth. It would be paradise, right?
Wrong, says Ricky Gervais, who co-wrote, co-directed and stars in "The Invention of Lying." The truth is brutal, and the only thing that keeps us from demeaning all the imperfect people in our lives is altruistic dishonesty.
In the movie, the man who discovers deceit, a struggling screenwriter named Mark Bellison, gets rich, gets the girl and gets hailed as a prophet.
This topsy-turvy flick is fitfully funny, but more often it's just odd, like the first draft of a "Twilight Zone" episode that's missing its moral. It takes place in a drab world of forthright insults and bared feelings.
Blind date Anna (Jennifer Garner) greets Mark by saying he's too chubby to successfully seduce her; their waiter confesses he hates his job and just took a sip of Anna's margarita.
After Mark is rudely dismissed from an educational-film company, he becomes the beneficiary of a bank error. Soon he finds that he can multiply his money, win back his job and seduce women by saying "things that aren't."
Yet we're supposed to regard Mark as a hero. He feigns compassion for a suicidal neighbor (Jonah Hill) and comforts his dying mother (Fionnula Flanagan) with a vision of "a man in the sky" who will welcome her with open arms.
As word spreads about this newly discovered God, Mark is hailed as His messenger, and marriage-minded Anna is torn between the prophet and a rival screenwriter with superior genes (Rob Lowe).
Ruefully smiling behind his trademark protective shell, Gervais makes it hard to sift through the mixed messages. On the one hand, he's dared to direct a mainstream movie asserting that God is a convenient fiction. In the other hand he's clutching a valentine, hoping we'll forgive and forget.
"The Invention of Lying" is an ambitious attempt to smash the wedding cake and eat it, too; but to say it succeeds would be stretching the truth.
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