This review was originally published during the Toronto Film Festival. The Invention of Lying opens today.
The Invention of Lying begins with a voiceover by the film’s co-writer/director and star Ricky Gervais, referring in the third person to his image on screen as that of a “chubby little loser.” Various variations of this epithet will be thrown at the Gervais character, a failing screenwriter named Mark, throughout the film; even his love interest, the lovely but shallow Anna (Jennifer Garner), tells him they can’t be together because she doesn’t want to spawn “little fat kids with snub noses.” Anna is brutally honest because everyone in Lying is — the film is set in an alternate universe version of a small American city in which not only does no one know how to tell a lie, but they’re moved to speak each truth that pops into their heads. So on Anna and Mark’s first date, Anna tells him over and over again that she’s there not because she finds him attractive, but because she’s afraid of dying alone. Their waiter greets them not with a welcome, but with the admission that he’s “very embarrassed to be working here.”
Turns out a world without bullshit is a glum one indeed. Unable to spice up his movie about the Black Plague with creative embellishment, Mark loses his job, and unable to make excuses about the rent, he faces eviction. He goes to his bank to withdraw the paltry remains of his account, when a crazy idea hits him: in a world of absolute truth, there is no disbelief, so if he tells the teller his account balance is higher than it is, she’ll probably give him what he asks for. She does, and this sets off a chain reaction of lies for the greater good. The trouble starts when Mark soothes the fears of his dying mother by telling her that she’ll live better in death than she did in life. When these lies about the afterlife spread, Mark accidentally invents an international cult that looks a lot like Christianity –– to the point where the buildings erected for quiet contemplation of his “man in the sky” bear icons of Mark with his arms outstretched, not on a cross but presenting the pizza boxes on which he’s scrawled his prophecies. And still, Anna won’t date him. “Does being rich and famous change your genetic material?” she asks, without guile. He has to admit that it doesn’t.
Gervais and co-director/writer Matthew Robinson don’t exactly have infinite track to run with this premise, but they make the most of it, teasing both well-earned pathos and gut-busting laughs (the many indie A-list cameos help) out of the notion that humans naturally resist happiness. The mid-narrative segue into religious allegory is a bit rocky, perhaps because the rules of the game are so ill-defined; was there no religion whatsoever pre-Pizza Hut tablets, or no just no Christianity? Was there ever a human named Jesus Christ, and if his birth wasn’t an epochal, calendar-structuring event, then what bloody year is it? It’s more successful as a meditation on the paradox of success. Winning at one or two aspects of life may solve three or four problems, but it rarely if ever cures our biggest insecurities, and if the person you love prizes “genetic material” over all other attributes and yours doesn’t suit their fancy, there’s little your money can do to help you out with that. By playing a chubby little man whose sense of himself as a loser can’t be changed by wealth and fame, Gervais rips open potentially autobiographical wounds, and also exorcises them. But it’s hard to write this off as mawkish public therapy — The Invention of Lying is just too damn fun.
The Hollywood Reporter imagines
