Movie Review: Where The Truth Lies

Egoyan’s ‘Truth’ is hard to swallow

Despite all the bare flesh, Where The Truth Lies lacks passion

By BRUCE KIRKLAND – Toronto Sun
October 12, 2005

PLOT: In the 1970s, a young journalist investigates two singer-comics
who starred in the 1950s. A long-suppressed scandal — the dead body
in their bathtub after a night of drugs and sex — looms large.

Atom Egoyan’s latest opus, the sexually charged murder mystery Where
The Truth Lies, is an immaculate conception for all its naughty
content.

Lush, sleek, beautifully conceived and photographed, the film is a
glossy artifact of high cinema. With its intellectual conceits,
time-shifting story and challenging ideas, it is a film with a
mainstream sheen and an arthouse complexity.

But Where The Truth Lies is also cold and distant and sterile. All
despite the naked sexcapades that include orgies and plenty of bare
flesh, both male and female.

We are left with a contemporary film noir lacking the passion of the
noir genre of the 1940s and ’50s. Noirs used to rumble, bark,
grind. The grit in the characters was as abrasive as
sandpaper. Egoyan’s film is too clean for the dirty little lies it
hides. And only some of the characters belong here.

Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon do belong, and both give edgy performances
that toughen the film’s spine and make this flawed movie worth
watching.

In Firth’s case, his work may even be a shocker, given how venal his
character becomes. Mr. Darcy was never this mean, this callous.

As the ugly American Lanny Morris and the slick Briton Vince Collins,
Firth and Bacon portray singer-comics of the 1950s. They are a
star-studded duo, versatile entertainers like Dean Martin and Jerry
Lewis, although this is not their real-life story.

In the movie, Lanny & Vince command nightclubs, flirt with the babes
in the audience. They also host their own telethon, ostensibly to
raise money for needy children, really to raise their likability
quotient.

After-hours, off stage, they booze it up, do drugs and do every woman
willing to strip and perform sexual acts, sometimes in group
orgies. No rules, no limits, no morality. The film explores the
changing nature of celebrity and excess.

One night, one woman (Rachel Blanchard in a brave support role in
which her sexuality is used as a dangerous weapon) ends up naked and
dead in the bathtub.

Two decades later, a young journalist (Alison Lohman) with a
tangential connection to the duo is given the chance to write a
tell-all book about their mercurial past career. The film, written by
Egoyan and based on a novel by American Rupert Holmes, uses Lohman’s
awkward, often ill-advised investigation to expose the harsh truths
and the lies.

Lanny & Vince, like Martin & Lewis, split up long ago in weird
circumstances. In the 1970s era, each now has his own agenda, his own
memory of what really happened. And how did that woman end up naked
and dead?

Egoyan, as he often does, time shifts to re-create the story,
stripping away layers and forcing characters to reveal themselves in
fragments. In this case, however, he relies on a catalyst who is not
up to the task. This is where the film fails.

Lohman, looking like a teenager and carrying no weight on screen in
this role, is woefully miscast. She is impossible to believe as
anything but a flyweight, except in her surprising lesbian
encounter. No one would give this girlish woman a million bucks to
write an expose. She is no match for Firth’s character, so the plot is
unbalanced, even unhinged.

There is also a serious problem with the climax-epilogue of the
story. As Egoyan tells the tale, he changes the emotional emphasis of
the piece in the final scene. The film turns out not to be what we
thought it was about all along. Bad move.

BOTTOM LINE: Played at the Cannes and Toronto filmfests. While it
boasts many fine qualities, including Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon’s
lusty performances as a musical comedy duo, Atom Egoyan’s opus falls
short of satisfaction.
(This film is rated 18-A)

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress