Years ago I read a novel called The Truth Machine by James L. Halperin that brilliantly extrapolated the results were a foolproof lie detector ever to be invented. This movie comically turns that premise on its head. Instead of lies being always detectable, no one thinks to tell one. Which, in turn, means that if one is told, no matter how absurd, it will not be detected.
It begins with a date. The gentleman, Mark, tells the lady, played by Jennifer Garner, that she is pretty. She tells him she’s just masturbated, and that he is sub-nosed and chubby. Since Mark is played by Ricky Gervais, this is true. Yet this begs the question, if lies cannot be told, does this require telling every truth? (It does in Liar Liar, somehow.) Is there something that actually requires the lady’s mother, when she calls, to ask a question to which the answer is, “I won’t be sleeping with him tonight. Nope, probably not even a kiss.” Apparently not, because other scenes show characters revealing truths that they were perfectly capable of not speaking for years earlier. And why, if such harsh truths are spoken routinely, does Mark’s boss hesitate to carry out his intention to fire him?
And if she was going to have to be telling him that she’d just masturbated beforehand, might not she have avoided doing so? But then, perhaps embarrassment over such things would be bred out of such a society. On the other hand, wouldn’t they stop asking each other “How’s it going?” when they really didn’t want to know? Some other tidbits are funny, but not really what would be likely in even a non-lying society. A Pepsi ad slogan is “When they don’t have Coke.” Mark’s mom lives in a place named “A Sad Place for Hopeless Old People.” Wouldn’t nursing home still work?
Having said that, I love presentations of hypothetical realities, even imperfect ones, and much humor comes from watching how people behave when the plot frees them from the need to observe social norms. As the title promises, most of the plot proceeds from when Mark realizes he can make up things. The funny part is not that he is able to tell lies, but that doesn’t even need to explain even ones that seem transparent. Of course , his ability to do so hinges precisely on everyone else’s credulity. In other words, he succeeds because no one else has a bullshit detector, and in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The lies are not the source of bliss; ignorance is.
Simultaneously, I found the film clever and illogical. In this world, Gervais’s narration tells us, even fictional films would be seen as lies, yet hypotheticals—what would you do if you could change the world?—are apparently not. However, the ability to conjure up a what-if scenario is the ability to imagine something that isn’t true. And if people would not lie, then surely they would make mistakes, and thus say things that were not true, and so the liar might yet be caught, and thought delusional. Yet there are not even words for true or false in the world of this movie.
The clever part is there, though, because Gervais is the cowriter and codirector (with Matthew Robinson). (In his prior star vehicle, Ghost Town, he just acted.) For once, he himself plays the nice guy, but in the movie’s best scenes, as in his series The Office and Extras, the humor comes from unintended cruelty, like how Mark’s love doesn’t want to be with a guy whose children will be chubby and snub-nosed. Some people have criticized the character for being too shallow to be a worthy love interest, but I think the point is that even good people have this side, only hidden. Nonetheless, when Mark tells her how kind she is, the supporting scenes are missing, and Garner’s twin facial expressions—adorable smile and look of bewilderment, won’t convince you that she’s Mark’s ideal woman.
Too much of the last third is devoted to what ends up being a conventional love story, and is less funny. I would have rather seen how, say, politics would be in a world without lies, but I suppose a world with honest politicians would be so unlike ours that to show it would only highlight the tenuous premise. So no politics. But what Gervais suggests about the role of God in such a world is the most provocative thing about the film.
IMDB link
viewed 4/17/10 on DVD [Netflix] and reviewed 4/18/10
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