What lies beneath

Bangkok Post – Thailand; Mar 24, 2006
KONG RITHDEE

Where the Truth Lies, Starring Kevin Bacon, Colin Firth, Alison
Lohman, Rachel Blanchard, Directed by Atom Egoyan : With a little help
from live lobsters, potbellied mobsters, and a 39-hour save-polio-kids
live telethon that succeeds in canonising a pair of showbiz sleazebags
as Angels of America, Lanny Morris and Vince Collins, a song-and-dance
nightclub duo from the 1950s, worm their way out of a murder scandal
when the corpse of a blonde waitress shows up in their hotel suite’s
bathtub. There’s a session of amphetamine-fuelled menage a trois,
complete with confusion over limbs and orifices, and a shot of
fantasised lesbian sex between Alice (as in Wonderland) and a
zonked-out Nancy Drew-wannabe in a slinky dress.

Sure it sounds like something that makes males sweat. But Where the
Truth Lies, Atom Egoyan’s schematic reconstruction of noirish
semi-potboilers, ends up like a pedantic exercise in complex
screenwriting that involves us in the process yet yields little
payoff. In classic Egoyan works, like Exotica, Felicia’s Journey and
above all The Sweet Hereafter (check them out on DVD), the
writer/director’s celebrated technique of jigsaw narrative – where the
story loops back and forth in time with sublime fluency, where the
characters’ fragmented memories supply the rich vein of narrative –
yields not simply a complete picture of what “really happened” after
the collages are put together, but also a profound feeling of
heartache and loss that strike his protagonists as inevitable.

Egoyan, a Canadian auteur of Armenian descent, remains as agile as
ever in his manipulation of past and present in this detective/drama
period montage.

But what I see is craft; and what’s lacking is the empathy we usually
feel for the characters suffering from the vestige of long-ago
tragedies, which makes Egoyan’s early films shrill and resonant.

Here the story relies on shifting points of view in recounting a
Rashomon-style murder mystery. In the late 1950s, Lanny Morris and
Vince Collins (Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth, in sinewy performances)
are a restless comic duo booked by nightclubs on either coast, usually
ones managed by the mob. Lanny (Bacon channelling a licentious lustre)
croons numbers and seduces pretty audiences as his buddy Vince pops
pills and beats up smart-ass male spectators in the toilet. Not
surprisingly, Lanny and Vince backstage are the id of their on-stage
superego, two cynical duds who suffer the showbiz burden of having to
be nice to the public when they know in the privacy of their own
hearts that they’re not nice guys.

That would remain tolerable enough had the wide-eyed corpse of
Maureen, a waitress who delivered room service to the duo three nights
before, not been found floating in their bathtub just after their
historic live telethon. The film fast forwards to the early ’70s,
where we meet Karen O’Connor (Alison Lohman), a journalist who’s
investigating the duo’s break-up following the scandal.

Karen approaches Vince for an interview – her publishing house agrees
to pay him a hefty sum – then in an incredible coincidence, she bumps
into Lanny on her first-class flight, where he wastes not a second in
seducing her with his smoothie’s spell. Karen lies to him about her
real job and identity, and the encounter fires her up to unearth the
truth about the murder 15 years ago.

What I’ve described is a simplification; Egoyan’s plot is pocketed
with little nooks and crannies that weave into a complicated web of
deceit, as flashbacks and recollections gradually peel off the cover.
They provide clues to solve the whodunit mystery, but I don’t think
they really add up to the meanings of the characters’ motives. The
recurring theme of the film is how everybody has double faces: one to
be worn in order to get what he/she wants, the other, naturally
uglier, is kept hidden under the lid until no more lies can cover the
truth. In this dynamism of duplicity – the gist of film noir tradition
– the roles of victims and perpetrators are constantly shifted as
truth and lies mingle freely. Lanny, Vince, Karen, and even Maureen –
when they take off their clothes in the film’s notorious NC-17 sex
scenes – are they also shedding their skins to reveal to us who they
really are?

Perhaps not. Stilted as the direction is, the film sometimes groans
under the heavy mechanism of its own plot. Where the Truth Lies is
based on a novel by Rupert Holmes, who used real-life celebrities,
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, as his protagonists (Lanny and Vince are
fictitious substitutes). The advantage of using real celebrities in
the narrative, I believe, is in showing the impact of social milieu of
post-war America, as the cult of celebrities gives way to moral
corruption. Lanny and Vince couldn’t have done what they did had they
not been exalted by the media in general and television in particular
to star status. They – as well as their groupies, Karen and Maureen
included – are the products of their own heady decades, though the
film could’ve pressed harder in this regard and recast its characters
at the centre of a cultural shift that’s taking place around them.

Sure we’ll find out the truth about what really happens to Maureen
that night in the hotel, all details of the incident neatly laid out
and wrapped in a nice package. That’s when the truth stops lying, and
unfortunately that’s also when the film stops being interesting.