The Invention of Lying (***)

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

Evan Almighty (**)

About twenty years ago, there was a comedy called Ishtar that was famous for costing about $55 million and making much less. Nowadays, people have gotten use to enormous sums being spent making movies, and so word that this is supposedly the costliest comedy ever made, once something a studio might have tried to hush, becomes something like a selling point. But it remains true that a hundred million dollars worth of effects won’t save a $29.95 script. That’s not literally what we have here, of course. Actually, a bundle was spent on a script, and that script was junked and rewritten by Steve Oedekerk, who turned it into a sequel to a 2003 hit he’d helped to write. It may be because the original script wasn’t supposed to be a sequel that this doesn’t feel much like Bruce Almighty, the Jim Carrey comedy.

Notwithstanding the title, Evan Baxter (Steve Carrell) doesn’t get to play God as Bruce did. God, again played with a wry approachability by Morgan Freeman, forces Evan to play Noah. Whereas Bruce was somewhat driven by the on-edge personality of its star, Evan is a blander creation, a career-driven husband and father with too little time. In other words, he’s the same character as the fathers in three quarters of the Hollywood “family” movies in the last ten years, not unlike the Cheaper by the Dozen remake, whose screenwriters helped out Oedekerk this time around. The movie also reminded me in a way of Signs, where God apparently lets aliens kill millions of people just so Mel Gibson can regain his faith. Here, the suggestion is that a devastating flood is just the thing to give Evan the opportunity to become closer to his wife (Lauren Graham) and three sons. God hates seeing the breakup of the wealthy suburban family.

Right off the bat, things look dodgy as Evan, the anchorman seen briefly in Bruce Almighty, bids viewers and Buffalo farewell to begin his new job as a US congressman. Let me get this straight. He’s been allowed to do the news during and after his campaign? Okay, it’s a point that can be overlooked in a comedy, but the movie is full of them. Later, Evan wakes up one morning with a scraggly beard that instantly grows back when he shaves; his unusual appearance is one thing that compels him to admit to his wife that he’s spoken to God, but she’s skeptical. Now, if you were Evan, what would you do to prove there’s been some divine madness? Shave in front of her, right? But Evan doesn’t do this.

Evan even gets its theology wrong. Running away from his record like a presidential candidate, the Freeman version of the Deity tells Evan that, when He decided to “destroy all flesh,” as the trusty King James puts it, with the first great flood, He wasn’t angry. Whereas Bruce Almighty made a valiant stab at explaining why there was unhappiness on earth, Evan just raises new questions, like, why does God always choose to look like Morgan Freeman? Oedekerk and director Tom Shadyc seem to want to soften God’s rough edges for a family audience, for this is much the family movie compared to its sarcastic predecessor. Typically, this means there’s a lot of jokes centered around various animal expulsions. When not directed at Evan, these land on the closest thing to a Devil character, a congressman (John Goodman) who wants Evan to cosponsor a bill to open up federal lands for development. We don’t get to find out if God (or Evan) is a Republican or a Democrat, but he definitely doesn’t dig suburban sprawl.

Subtract the poop jokes and the hairiness jokes and the jokes about all the animals mysteriously following Evan around and there’s not much to recommend this as a comedy. Wanda Sykes gets the most laughs as Evan’s congressional aide. The lapses in logic ruin it as a fantasy movie, too. I’m not sure if all million-plus animal species are represented on Evan’s ark, but it doesn’t matter, as their major purpose would seem to be those poop jokes. In terms of the story, their presence turns out to be almost entirely superfluous.

As for all the money, it isn’t entirely wasted. The producers really built a biblical-scale ark, and it was admittedly a miraculous thing to watch it flow through the flooded mall in downtown Washington, DC. Thus, a not-funny cookie-cutter comedy with a heavy-handed environmental message and six really cool minutes. Be sure to look for those six minutes on cable. On the whole, though, I’d rather watch Ishtar.

IMDB link