The Calgary Herald (Alberta)
October 7, 2005 Friday
Final Edition
Egoyan’s Truth lost in the layers: Bacon, Firth shine despite
narrative mess
by Jay Stone, CanWest News Service
Where The Truth Lies
Starring: Kevin Bacon, Colin Firth.
Directed and written by Atom Egoyan
Rating 2 1/2 out of five
– – –
Director Atom Egoyan makes movies that are very much about the
moviemaking process: not cameras and film stock, but how a filmmaker
sees a story, how he plucks one narrative out of the multitudes that
surround any event.
At his best, in such films as Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter,
Egoyan’s elusiveness helps strengthen the story by giving us several
versions of it, allowing a mosaic itself to become a character, or a
mystery.
Author Russell Banks, who wrote the novel on which The Sweet
Hereafter was based, was undoubtedly thinking of Egoyan when he said
turning a book into a movie was like smashing a stained-glass window
and making a vase out of the shards. The trouble with this approach
is that it can also put so many layers between us and the story that
the movie becomes about the layers.
Ararat, a highly personal Egoyan film about the Armenian holocaust,
was filmed as a movie-within-a-movie, an approach that cooled the
passions disastrously: the anger or the mourning that must have
fuelled the desire to tell the tale in the first place was replaced
by a meditation on memory, and tragedy seemed like device.
The same problems arise with Where The Truth Lies, a neo-noir full of
highly watchable, lurid subject matter — Hollywood celebrity, a
murder mystery, lots of sex — that has become a jumble of confusing
viewpoints and chronologies.
This is Egoyan’s biggest movie to date ($25 million), featuring the
biggest stars he has ever worked with in Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth,
but the combination of accessible material and name talent has
overwhelmed his vision. You can almost feel Bacon and Firth aching to
break through the layers of technique.The result is artificial and,
in the last reel, absurd.
Bacon and Firth play Lanny and Vince, a famous comedy/singing act of
the 1950s who enjoy a gaudy, Vegas-style success, access to many
lovely women and a wise guy’s knowledge about the benefits of
celebrity.
However, there is a scandal in their lives when a blond turns up dead
in their hotel bathtub.The act dissolves, Lanny and Vince stop
talking to one another, and the mystery of the blond is never solved.
Years later, a reporter named Karen O’Connor (Alison Lohman,
overwhelmed by the task) sets out to write a tell-all book that will
unveil the mystery.
At the end, we finally learn what happened with Lanny and Vince, and
the upshot turns out to be such an ancient movie joke that you wonder
if it was meant as a parody of some of the routines the boys used in
their heyday.
Egoyan tells this story from several points of view and in different
timeframes, a commentary on the unreliability of the narrator,
perhaps, but a son-of-a-gun for the viewer trying to keep things
straight or, more importantly, believable.
Within a glittery production design, much of Where The Truth Lies
seems stagy and fake, and you suspect that not all is a purposeful
metaphor for the mists of the past.
The sex scenes, including the famous menage-a-trois among Lanny,
Vince and a hotel chambermaid (Rachel Blanchard) — the scene that
earned Egoyan the harmful NC-17 rating in the United States — are
oddly unerotic.
The shock of seeing stars the magnitude of Bacon and Firth engaging
in a naked frolic is only part of the reason. There’s also a cool,
distancing effect in Egoyan’s direction that makes the episodes seem
almost laughable.
Within this fractured mystery are several enjoyable episodes,
including a scene in which Karen meets Lanny and his butler (David
Hayman) on a 1970s airplane whose first-class section is as
wonderfully retro as an arborite kitchenette, and scenes from the
telethon in which Bacon and Firth persuade us that, all expectations
to the contrary, they could have been a successful act.
Bacon is especially good as the hip, womanizing Lanny, who is smarter
than he seems and Firth has a light touch that darkens later as the
reporter edges closer to the truth.
By then, though, Where The Truth Lies has collapsed into a pile of
good intentions and narrative obsessions. This was to be Egoyan’s
breakthrough into the mainstream, but it is too complex, too thought
out and neither the truth nor the lies seems to have any reality.
GRAPHIC:
Colour Photo: Courtesy, Alliance Atlantis; Kevin Bacon, left, Rachel
Blanchard and Colin Firth in Canadian director Atom Egoyan’s Where
the Truth Lies.