The Invention of Lying

Seen at: Cinemark 16, Fort Collins, CO on Mon. Oct. 26

From the trailers, I knew that The Invention of Lying was one of the those movies that I was definitely not going to pay full price for, so I schlepped out of the house on Monday morning to catch the very first pre-noon show at the Cinemark 16, which is about three miles from where I type this.

Ten minutes into this movie, I knew it was going to be a disaster, so much so that my jaw was hanging open from what I was seeing.

First, a little background, in case you didn't see the trailer. This movie is supposedly set in a fictional world in which lying has never been invented. There isn't even a word for lying, and people have no concept of it. The story follows a hapless man named Mark (Ricky Gervais) who one day discovers how to tell lies. This changes his whole life, and eventually the world. Much of the narrative is driven by a romance, namely Mark's pursuit of the beautiful but dunderheaded Anna (Jennifer Garner). There's a whole raft of supporting roles and cameos from other well-known actors who somehow got roped into making this.

But this is a Gervais project, thorugh and thorugh, as he not only starred in it, but wrote and directed it. It therefore gives a pretty good glimpse at his vision of the world, and it is an ugly and confused vision.

What's so screwed up about this movie? It's that it indulges in what I consider to be one of the greatest errors of Postmodernity: the conflation of being honest with being obsessively and proactively candid. I see this conflation over and over, and I think it is a sickness of our time, that we no longer understand the concept of honesty, and by extension truth. This movie does not really explore this, but instead wallows in the error---well at least for most of the time. It had it's moments, ones that almost redeemed it.

For most of the movie, the charcters in this "honest" world go around spontaneously saying every thought and emotion that crosses their mind. To be honest, according to Gervais, is to be constantly cruel and vulgar. Insults are flung with ease. Men openly proclaim there sexual desires, and women, of course, spend most of their time recoiling from them. Come to think of it, this is a lot like the world now. Maybe this movie is brilliant after all.

Let's compare this to the world of Classical cinema, which indeed is a world in which decent and honorable characters are indeed obsessively honest. Classical cinema understood the difference between honesty and obsessive candor, and the high value of discretion. Heroes and heroines of Classical stories could go out of their way to tell the truth even while using the truth to deceive a villain, or protect a loved one or an innocent person. The only time Classical heroes were permitted to outright lie was when it was necessary to protect the honor of someone else, and this lying usually took the form of taking the blame or responsibility for something the hero didn't actually do (i.e., self-sacrifice).

Yet this honesty was not considered a weakness but a strength. Such honesty made characters who were impeccable, whose word was unbreakable, and who were built out of steel (Superman is actually a great example---he lived an entire double life without having to openly tell lies).

That someone like Gervais can make a movie like this shows you how far away from this notion we have come. Honesty is now considered a weakness of character, one that must be overcome. The world needs lies at every turn, we are told, if it is to turn at all. How low we have sunk, when we no longer even recognize what honesty and truth are.

The movie was saved from being a complete disaster by a story that did not painfully follow the trajectory I anticipated. I mentioned recently how deception is the basic spice of Hollywood stories, one that can create proper Hollywood narrative where it would not otherwise exist. I figured this movie would follow the standard outline of a "deception" story, given the subject matter, but instead it wandered off in directions I did not quite anticipate. This actually made it more watchable, thankfully. Act Three zigged when I thought it would zag, and so I wasn't completely disgusted and bored by the end, but curious to see how it would turn out.

At one point the story suprised me by delving into the realm of spirituality in a rather nuanced way. Probably the most interesting point of the movie is when Mark unwittingly "invents" a story of the afterlife to calm the fears of his dying mother. When others hear of this idea, it spirals out of control, such that Mark becomes a prophet of the first "religion."

There were some beautiful moments in here. One could have read the first "lie" Mark told as in fact divine revelation, and thus his "falsehood" about the immortality of the soul was, unbeknownst to him, truth.

But this story is not enlightened enough to linger in that state. Instead it devolves into the silliness of showing that all religions are outrageous "lies" about a "man in the sky," while simultaneously shoving outrageous product placement for a pizza franchise in our face (I'm not kidding here). That mythologies are "falsehoods" is a subject worthy of exploring, but this was just juvenile, pointless, and nihilistic.

Perhaps the stupidest part of thi supposed romantic comedy is the romance itself. Mark (Gervais) keeps telling Anna (Garner) what a wonderful person she is. Uh, no she's not. She's stupid, superficial, vain, and self-centered. The only reason he is pursuing her is because of her pretty face. But instead of admitting this fact, it is projected onto the rival and villain (Rob Lowe). Thus Mark is actually lying to himself about why he likes Anna. But the movie does not explore this irony at all. It is unconscious of its own overt falsehoods, while thinking it is being clever in revealing the falsehoods of others. Come to think of it, that's a great description of Postmodernity as a whole.

Verdict: a Postmodern train wreck that was interesting only because the story was not completely predictable.