Movie Review - The Invention of Lying

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Ricky Gervais, the award-winning creator and star of the original BBC series The Office and HBO's Extras, returns with the new romantic comedy The Invention of Lying.  It’s a high-concept affair, taking place in an alternate universe where humankind is physically incapable of lying.  The result being that we, as a species, have never developed concepts such as diplomacy or tact.  People simple say what they truly feel.  Don’t want a go on a date with a co-worker you’re not attracted to?  You won’t tell him or her that you’re busy or already in a relationship.  Instead, you’ll tell them that you simply don’t find them attractive.  Mark Bellison (Gervais) is a screenwriter in this world.  He works for Lecture Films, the world’s largest movie studio. However, in a world where people are unable to lie, the ability to act has never developed; so movies are a bit different in this world.  Gone are big-budget, action-packed extravaganzas.  Instead, we get history lessons read to us from various lecturers.  The studios most recent hit film was Napoleon: 1812-1813.  Bellison is a second-tier screenwriter assigned the unenviable task of mining the 1300s for stories that don’t involve the Black Plague.  His world is turned upside down when one day he discovers that he has the ability to lie.

Lying is such an abstract concept in this world that words don’t even exist that will convey to his friend Greg (Louis C.K.) what exactly he has discovered.  Bellison quickly discovers how powerful he is.  In a world without lying, everyone is conditioned to believe anything that anyone might tell them (no matter how ludicrous).  At first he uses this skill to do precisely what you would expect anyone in a high-concept comedy to do: steal money and seduce women.  However, he finds both to be hollow experiences, lying his way out of seduction before he has to “seal the deal.”  In an ironic twist, lying doesn’t free him from responsibility; it makes him even more tethered to society.  The inability to lie freed him from the responsibility of social niceties.  He wasn’t able, or expected, to be polite.  But once he has the capacity to lie, he feels compelled to protect people’s feelings.  He recognizes his world for the rude place that it is.

The film is ostensibly a romantic-comedy with him pursuing the “out-of-his-league” Anna (Jennifer Garner).  However, about 40 minutes into the film, it takes an unexpected turn.  Bellison is at his dying mother’s bedside.  She’s scared to die and, in an effort to comfort her, he, well…he invents religion.  Not “a” religion, mind you, but religion.  He assures his mother that upon her death, she’ll go to a place where everyone gets a mansion and all of her friends and loved ones will be waiting for you her.  It’s clear, not only from her reaction but from the doctors’ and nurses’ reactions, that this is not only new information but an entirely heretofore unheard of concept.  As word leaks out about the afterlife, Bellison is besieged by both a media and a public desperate for more information.  So he gives them more.  He tells them about a “man in the sky” who you must keep happy if you’d like to go to the “good place” when you die.  His description of religion is devoid of divinity or mysticism, overly simplistic and most likely patently offensive to 95% of the population…it’s also hysterical.  But then, I’m pretty difficult to offend.  The more seriously you take your religious beliefs, the less likely it is that you’ll find the film (especially the last half) amusing.

Though the film can be very funny, it can be just as repetitious.  Until the movie finds religion, as it were, it’s essentially a one joke film.  Granted, that joke is funny and Gervais strives to put that joke into new situations but there’s only so much he can do.  At times, the picture is more “clever” than it is funny.  Ironically, where the film truly excels is in the parts that will almost certainly prove to be the most controversial.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being Walt Disney’s Pinocchio and 1 being Roberto Benigni’s Pinocchio, The Invention of Lying gets a 7.

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