Creepshow
'Where Truth Lies' a tawdry, unconvincing showbiz tale

For a storyline so concerned with ferreting out the truth, Where The Truth Lies demands an awful lot of suspended disbelief. Adapted and directed by Atom Egoyan from the Rupert Holmes novel, this tawdry showbiz tale never establishes a foundation of credibility on which to build its pyramid of sex, drugs, scandal, and murder.

In a popular comedy act of the late 1950s, Vince Collins (Colin Firth) is the classy British straight man, and Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon) is the Bronx Jewish goofball. Heroes to millions for their annual 39-hour telethons to raise money to fight polio, they live offstage lives of gonzo excess: pills, rough sex, and sudden violence. Their act falls apart after a beautiful blonde is found dead in their hotel room, even though the story is kept hushed up from the public. 15 years later, attractive young journalist Karen O'Connor (Alison Lohman) begins to investigate the case, and finds herself in a tangle of sex, lies, conjecture, and blackmail with both men.

Egoyan seems to be attempting a kind of sleek L. A. Confidential-type noir thriller, but nothing adds up. Both Bacon and Firth deliver scathingly fearless individual performances, but Collins and Morris don't have much of an act: neither is particularly funny or charismatic onstage, they display little of the chemistry of longtime showbiz partners, and they seem to barely tolerate each other (which makes it hard to believe the bond the mystery plot insists they share). Neither is Lohman very convincing as a smart-cookie journalist—especially in idiotic scenes when she takes an unknown pharmaceutical at dinner knowing one victim has already died from drugs and alcohol, or divulges to a potential murderer exactly how she's going to destroy him.

The facts of the murder plot progress from convoluted to downright silly, and Egoyan's insists on that tired cliché of multiple flashbacks to the same scenes from different viewpoints (during one of which, Karen apparently "sees" a clue no eyewitness has actually told her). Worst of all, the whole enterprise seems so pointless. Scandal in showbiz trappings is nothing new, nor does Egoyan do anything paticularly fresh, original, or resonant with the material. (Besides declining an NC-17 rating so as not to dilute the sex scenes.) Despite fine performances from Bacon and Firth, none of these creepy characters make for a story worth telling.

WHERE THE TRUTH LIES With Kevin Bacon, Colin Firth, and Alison Lohman. Written and directed by Atom Egoyan. From the novel by Rupert Holmes. (Not rated) 108 minutes. (**)
Review published in Good Times, Oct. 27, 2005