The Invention of Lying transplants Ricky Gervais, Reading accent intact, to an idealised place (filmed in Lowell, Massachusetts) where there’s no such thing as lying – until one day, in a brainwave, he invents it. Gervais plays Mark Bellison, a writer of documentaries for a film company. Since fiction doesn’t exist, history is the only subject for movies.
Gosh quite a poor review for this film from the Catholic Herald. Shame I really like Ricky Gervais (I love his TV work) 
Previous Post
Hollywood blunts Gervais’s edge
This unconvincing, even odious new film is a long way from his best work, says Andrew M Brown
The Invention of Lying transplants Ricky Gervais, Reading accent intact, to an idealised place (filmed in Lowell, Massachusetts) where there’s no such thing as lying – until one day, in a brainwave, he invents it. Gervais plays Mark Bellison, a writer of documentaries for a film company. Since fiction doesn’t exist, history is the only subject for movies.
However, it’s not simply that people only tell the unvarnished truth, good or bad. They concentrate on those aspects of the truth that are most painful and display none of the usual anxiety about causing offence.
In this movie everyone is allowed to be rude in the British style that well-mannered Americans are supposed to think a hoot, like Simon Cowell or Gordon Ramsay. The concept provides some jokes for the first quarter of an hour in which Mark goes on a dinner date with the impossibly attractive Anna (Jennifer Garner); after that the novelty starts to pall.
Anna admits straight away to feeling “depressed and pessimistic about our date tonight” and icily informs Mark that she thinks he’s fat and snub-nosed and she will definitely not be sleeping with him. This throws up the film’s first bothersome inconsistency: if Mark is so unsuitable for Anna then why is she going on a date with him in the first place? If this is a world of total honesty surely such social agonies would be unnecessary?
Come to that, one wonders what Mark really sees in this social X-ray, especially once he has sat through her dismantling of his appearance and personality. Anna is Hollywood’s idea of the perfect woman, but no one else’s: preternaturally thin and angular but still with pillow-like lips, obsessed with finding her “genetic match” and having perfect babies. For this reason she prefers Rob Lowe, perfect as Brad Kessler, a slimeball with 1950s matinee idol looks who works at the film company with Mark.
Mark is a “loser” in every respect: the film fairly hammers this message. He lives in an ugly apartment block where his next door neighbour (Jonah Hill from Superbad) spends every night attempting suicide. Mark has no girlfriend, nor realistic hopes of getting one. Once Jeffrey Tambor (Hank Kingsley in Larry Sanders) as the nervous company boss sacks him, he no longer even has a job.
It’s at this point of crisis that a brainwave hits him. It’s an idea that has never occurred to anyone else: lie. The forms the lying takes are not complex or clever; they don’t need to be, since Mark has only invented lying for his private use. For everybody else, the old rules – truth only – still apply. So, for example, he needs $800 for the rent but has only $300 in his account, so he lies to the bank teller saying actually, yes, he has $800 in his account. She believes him and hands over the cash. It’s as easy as that. He gets his job back and universal acclaim and riches simply by making up new stories for the company to make films about.
The problems come for Mark, and the film swerves in a more serious direction, when he starts telling more grandiose tales. Gervais himself is known for his atheism and the world he and his co-writer and director, Matthew Robinson, imagine, before Mark invents lying, is a world without religion. And yet, faced with the imminent death of his mother (Fionnula Flanagan with Dick van Dyke-style Cockney accent) and her fears about “an eternity of nothingness” that awaits her, Mark comes up with a theory of an afterlife to ease her mind.
In no time the crowds are hailing him as a kind of Messiah on account of his special knowledge of the “man in the sky”. As with Gervais’s HBO television show Extras, the movie is inlaid with cameos by celebrities who are in awe of his comic talents. I’m not sure what purpose these appearances serve unless it is to show how well-connected he is. Jason Bateman is good as a hospital doctor, but little is added by Philip Seymour Hoffman playing a pink-eyed bartender. Edward Norton plays a policeman in a scene that’s supposed to be funny but falls flat. One scene that provokes a chuckle involves Gervais stalwarts Shaun Williamson and Stephen Merchant as a burglar and his victim.
It is hard not to see the blunting effect of Hollywood on this project. Gervais and Robinson fail to explore the central concept, its darker implications especially, with the daring one associates with Gervais’s best work. The romantic plot is unconvincing, even odious. One longs to laugh as one did at The Office, so for that we may have to wait for his forthcoming British picture, Cemetery Junction. Gervais specialises in the comedy of embarrassment, but in The Invention of Lying there’s simply not enough embarrassment – not the right kind, anyway.
If you have stumbled onto this blog and are not a Christian, get yourself a hot drink, pull up a comfy chair and then tuck into the following article written by one of the best in the business:- All Of Grace by Charles Spurgeon
Tags: Media