The Invention of Lying

In many ways, Ricky Gervais' directorial debut is remarkably unassuming. The direction is sit-com flat, the setting is clearly some small town in Manitoba with generous tax credits for filmmakers, and nothing flashy gets in the way of Gervais' extremely inventive comedic premise: a world where people did not possess the ability to tell a lie. For the first hour or so, Lying takes this premise and mines it for bucket after bucket of gold comedy nuggets. Watching people bluntly tell each other exactly what their thinking is endlessly amusing, and the humor becomes even sharper and more satirically pointed when Ricky Gervais' schlubby everyman discovers that he, alone in the world, has the power to say things that aren't true. Gervais uses his new power to gain wealth, fame, and, in the film's most inspired sequence, invent the concept of religion.

It's amazing, then, that a film so seemingly intent on keeping the focus on its comedic premise could feature the single most disastrous, painful, poorly conceived romantic subplot in the history of cinema. The second half of the movie comes to a miserable crawl as Gervais attempts to woo Jennifer Garner, a woman who he dated before his transformation who has bluntly told him that she doesn't find him attractive enough to have a relationship with. The plotting is mind-numbingly familiar (it's spoiling nothing to reveal that at one point, Gervais has to stop a wedding!?!), the scenes of a heart-broken Gervais moping around are glacial and unfunny, and the object of Gervais' affection is a vacuous, superficial void. Her insistence on an attractive mate (so as to create genetically advantageous offspring) is taken to be a manifestation of her unchangeable honesty, but the world of the movie contains intangible qualities such as love and humor, and Gervais' love seems completely unwarranted, especially since she acts more than anything like a lazily-programmed robot. The only reason Gervais could possible want her is that Garner is attractive, and Gervais projects positive qualities onto this person who shows no evidence of possessing them. It's the sort of unthinking misogyny that one would hope an incisive comic mind like Gervais would be immune to. One thing The Invention of Lying teaches us is that the sharpest male mind is no match for Botoxed lips and a tight butt.