here the Truth Lies pulls off the neat trick of being both half-baked and overcooked. As ambitious and confident as it appears, it is beset by a curious lack of conviction. It’s like watching a reticent stripper with five overcoats, by the time she gets down to business, you’re not really paying attention. The promising opening, truly exciting premise, and the performance of the always remarkable Kevin Bacon mean that it is not bad in the deepest, darkest Flightplan sense of the word, but, certainly, not that good.

Atom Egoyan has entered the frothy waters of the erotic thriller, luckily for us, not at the Wild Orchid end of the scale. Where the Truth Lies has the seductive, lingering veneer of the best proponents of the genre such as Lynch’s Lost Highway and Cronenberg’s Crash, but severely lacks the substance and assurance of either. One of the major difficulties of the film turns on the fact that, as a comic duo, Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth are rather frightening, not funny. The opening telethon scene was a missed opportunity, a chance to clinch some credibility early on. But the poor material leaves it rather flat, more Sonny and Cher than Martin and Lewis. Scorcese’s The King of Comedy and Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys present believable and talented old pros in Jerry Lewis, George Burns and Walter Matthau. As captivating as Kevin Bacon is, all lizardous sleaze and thin lipped cynicism, it would have been intriguing to have seen a recognised funnyman in the role. It’s hard to believe in the dark side of comedy, without the comedy.

However, these are mere quibbles in the face of the film’s real problem. Where the Truth Lies insists on telling you what’s going on exactly as it happens. It’s an excruciatingly patronising habit that reveals a total lack of belief. Egoyan buries the participation of the audience under endless, unnecessary exposition. Surely, there are more interesting ways to communicate what’s happening than just watching the characters tell one another. In a seemingly desperate attempt for an adult story, Egoyan wildly underestimates the audience’s ability to piece things together. The joy of something like Lost Highway is in the pleasure of making your own interpretive leaps, relying on your own instincts, not that of the director, over-anxiously fingering your brain.


The performances go some way to redeeming the authorial calamities. Colin Firth is excellent as the stiff, pill-popping straight man Vince Collins, who turns out to be anything but (unsuccessfully showing Kevin Bacon just how stiff he can be). Kevin Bacon, easily one of the most unpredictable and fearless actors in Hollywood, is enthralling as the ruthless lothario Lanny Morris. Bacon’s screen movement is incredible. He swings and sashays, smokes and screws like his life depended on it. He is lean and sexy in a dangerous kind of way. As a young reporter out to expose the two fading stars, Alison Lohman fails spectacularly: drugged, seduced and responsible for one of their deaths, she never seems to actually write anything. Stunningly attractive and invitingly vulnerable, Lohman is given the unfortunate and insipid task of saying everything she is thinking—some challenge when her vacuous character lags five scenes behind everyone else, the audience included. Her past as a former polio victim and devout Morris and Collins worshipper is cute but doesn’t seem to resonate in any of her decisions within the story. The effective and psychedelic lesbian scene with Alice in Wonderland aside, it was hard to rally behind her.

The film vainly attempts to retain our attention with sparkles of salacious distractions that have little bearing on its actual concerns, leaving it disjointed and dislocated from its own centre. It apes the mannerisms of the mystery thriller without taking on board the shrewd economy of the genre. The Citizen Kane structure provides a little genuine intrigue, temporarily locking these disparate parts together. It is a beautifully cinematic thing, to piece together someone’s life through the interpretations of others. However, the mesmerising bravura of Kane is nowhere to be seen here. It is a testament to Welles’ filmmaking talent that he can turn the death of a narcissist tyrant into a tragedy, while Egoyan, despite his strenuous attempts, cannot invoke sympathy over the cruel murder of an innocent teenager.

Creeping through the dirty secrets of celebrity is a captivating subject, especially the inexplicably mysterious and aesthetically pleasing 50’s era entertainment circuit. James Ellroy is probably the most successful of the writers working in this area. The triumph of Ellroy is that the periods he writes about are not just an attractive backdrop: the stories themselves emerge from that time. His novels are like memories, raw emotions still clinging, more convincing than period detail. And within these contextualized stories are woven, unashamedly, pulp mysteries. The honesty of Ellroy is the defeat of Egoyan. Where the Truth Lies is ultimately a mystery that rejects the genre, and thus rejects its own chances as a plausible mystery. I cannot see on what terms the film hopes to succeed. In the end it unmasks itself, exposed and foundering in the unfortunate position of both villain and victim.