*½/****
starring Kevin Bacon, Colin Firth, Alison Lohman, Rachel Blanchard
screenplay by Atom Egoyan, based on the novel by Rupert Holmes
directed by Atom Egoyan
by Bill Chambers Canadian filmmakers tend to expose their limitations when they mimic American pop (see: the oeuvres of Jerry Ciccoritti and Mary Harron), and Atom Egoyan, who adapts his signature post-modernism to the Boogie Nights/Goodfellas paradigm in Where the Truth Lies, is no exception. Part of the problem is that it's almost impossible to empathize with journo Karen O'Connor's (Alison Lohman) attraction to the world of Lanny (Kevin Bacon, in what I'm tempted to call a career-best turn) and Vince (Colin Firth), a quasi-Martin & Lewis rended asunder by a scandal years before–not only because these movies are morality tales and thus must initially offer some vicarious thrills, but also because Egoyan is such a fucking Martian that his looking glass isn't perversely seductive (like, say, Blue Velvet's), only off-putting. Indeed, at the forefront of one's mind throughout Where the Truth Lies is whether Egoyan intended it to be so ridiculous, from the inscrutable casting of Firth as a Vaudevillian entertainer to the cornball "Alice in Wonderland" imagery (he even uses Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" on the soundtrack as if it's maybe not a drug song) to the '70s period markers (big moustaches for the boys, big afros for the dark-skinned extras) to, my personal favourite, Lohman playing Karen as a nine-year-old by putting shoes on her knees. That being said, perhaps more disconcerting than Egoyan's failure to either beat 'em or join 'em is that after all these years, he's still making lugubrious, young-man's art that wallows in Sartrean despair. PROGRAMME: Viacom Galas
