The Quip And The Dead

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday May 13, 2006

SANDRA HALL

WHERE THE TRUTH LIES

Written and directed by Atom Egoyan from the novel by Rupert Holmes

Rated R

Running time 106 minutes

Showing Now

Cinemas George Street, Palace Verona and Norton Street, Greater Union Bondi, Cremorne Orpheum

* *

Mr Darcy tackles a new period drama as the seedy '70s unfold in a satirical whodunit.

CASTING COLIN FIRTH as a stand-up comic is the first of Canadian director Atom Egoyan's unorthodox decisions in filming Rupert Holmes's showbiz novel, Where the Truth Lies.

Firth's gruff wit has its charms - flatteringly displayed during his star turn as Pride & Prejudice's Mr Darcy - but the idea of him as a professional motormouth, dancing across the stage while dispensing quick quips and reliable punchlines, is akin to having Robert De Niro play Rudolf Nureyev.

True, his performance here is not a solo. He's half of a double-act in which he's assigned the role of straight man, using his Englishness to drop acid on the fizzier personality of his partner, Kevin Bacon, who plays the prankster. We're back in the late 1950s and Firth's Vince Collins and Bacon's Lanny Morris are much-loved comedy stars of stage and screen.

Holmes had Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in mind when he wrote the book, but Lanny's pranks are a lot racier than anything Lewis ever perpetrated and Vince has none of Martin's capacity for keeping things casual. Onstage, he's prone to sarcasm. Offstage, he's capable of taking a heckling nightclub patron outside and giving him a battering.

The pair are also enthusiastic womanisers. One night the nude body of a hotel chambermaid is found in their suite. Neither is blamed for her death, but the resulting scandal wrecks their partnership. Fifteen years pass and Karen O'Connor (Alison Lohman), a young reporter steeped in the tell-all spirit of New Journalism, approaches Vince for an interview, spurred by the prospect of a lucrative book deal if she can get him to talk about the partners' break-up and what he knows about the dead hotel maid.

Then Egoyan, who's always been fascinated by memory and the way it can refract and re-invent the past, gets busy slicing up the narrative and re-ordering its constituent parts like the shuffling of a deck of cards.

It's a dark story in a sun-struck setting - played out in resort hotels, a nightclub, a TV studio and the hilltop house in Los Angeles to which the now reclusive Vince has retreated in retirement.

He has also grown a moustache the size of a large caterpillar and taken to wearing polyester - although this ardent embrace of the seediest facets of '70s fashion seems less an indication of character than an attempt to keep us anchored in the right era amid the script's increasingly complicated time shifts.

Lanny, who also re-appears in these sequences, displays slightly better taste. He has also retained his laddish demeanour, along with his English butler (David Hayman) and his confidence in being able to have any woman he wants. And O'Connor, who has had a crush on him since childhood, soon jettisons her journalistic ethics - not a great sacrifice - and lands in his bed.

Bacon's familiar sneer works overtime here. That asymmetrical face, which looks as if it's been unsteadily pieced together after a bad accident, frequently causes him to be cast as a sleazeball and, clearly lacking all vanity, he gives each of these characters his best shot. But this script lets him - and Firth - down, especially in the scenes when they're at work together onstage and in the studio. Despite the hoots of hilarity erupting from the laughter track, their act is profoundly unfunny and, given that the story is supposed to be as much satire as whodunit, their bad jokes are flaws from which the film never recovers.

Reviewers of the book concentrated much of their praise on O'Connor's narrative voice. Funny and sardonic, she served as the story's presiding sensibility - a streetwise Alice in Wonderland garrulously abandoning all caution to step into the unknown.

Egoyan, who prefers to let you find your own way through a film, has damped down O'Connor's commentary in favour of switching points of view, which is very cinematic of him. But her sharpness has been lost in the shuffle, and much of the film's vitality has gone with it. The Alice in Wonderland references remain, as does O'Connor's air of being out of her depth - a feeling obviously shared by Lohman herself, given the blandness with which she parrots her lines.

Egoyan, who showed such tenderness for his characters in his best film, the Russell Banks adaptation The Sweet Hereafter, lavishes most of his attention this time on the fractured design of his plot-making. And even then, he doesn't bring it off. As the convolutions multiply, so do the unlikely coincidences en route to an ending that leaves you with one unanswered question: So what?

© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald

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