Truths and Consequences

Where the Truth Lies (Atom Egoyan, Canada/UK)

By Liam Lacey

The truth behind Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies, an arty, convoluted, and unpersuasive showbiz whodunit,may lie in the wonky vicissitudes of Canadian film policy. Canada ’s top filmmakers recently have been caught in a bizarre relationship with their usually generous government benefactors, who have laid down an ultimatum: get more commercial or lose public funding. A year ago, Egoyan told the Toronto Star he found himself forced to shift ground, thanks to new policies from Telefilm Canada , with its dubious decision to push Canadian movies to compete with the Hollywood machine. Where David Cronenberg opted to sign with New Line for the job-for-hire A History of Violence, Egoyan, meanwhile, working outsidethe US studio system—Where the Truth Lies is a Canada-UK co-production—has also attempted to do a kind of genre film with a personal twist.

Where the Truth Lies is a backstage crime story, with echoes of L.A. Confidential (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001). Based on the novel by Rupert Holmes, writer of story songs (“The Pina Colada Song”) and musicals (The Mystery of Edwin Drood), the film likewise seems intended as a dishy send-up of the florid excesses of 70sculture. By a large margin, this is his biggest budget to date ($24 million US). He’s using mid-level Hollywood bankable stars (Kevin Bacon, Colin Firth—the UK part—and Alison Lohman) and an American setting. At Cannes , the film’s producer, Robert Lantos, emphasized the film’s commercial aspirations, describing Where the Truth Liesas an Egoyan movie for people who don’t know Atom Egoyan, and a “joy ride”; he suggested he didn’t really think of it as a festival film.

Certainly Holmes’ novel is enjoyably trashy. Young journalist Karen O’Connor, armed with a book deal and a fascination with a has-been comedy duo strongly resembling Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, wants to know why the two men broke up their act the night a naked girl was found deadin their New Jersey Mob hotelbathroom 15 years earlier. The book’s strength is its competing voices: The principle narrator is the clever, self-satisfied Karen, writing in a prose style that is, by her own account, “purple, with a tart finish.” The other voice comes from the salty, wise-guy memoirs of Lanny Morris, a Brooklyn-born clown and autodidact who recounts tales of broads, mobsters, booze, and pills. Over the course of the film version, other characters offer their contributions, adding to the pile of conjecture.

Egoyan’s production values have never been so lavish, and he shoots in a pastiche of styles to conform to the shifting points of view. A whirling world of Alice in Wonderland strangeness initially surrounds Karen; Lanny’s memories are staged to suggest their artificiality—we get orgies and a punch-out scene in a nightclub that evokes Martin Scorsese’s showbiz gangsters. There are women who appear to be doubles, as in Vertigo (1958), or, in more recent form, Mulholland Drive . There’s a third-act confrontation on the surreal world of a Hollywood backlot, set to a throbbing Mychael Danna soundtrack that’s reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann. These tropes and quotations are generally fun. The troubles, however, are twofold: a structure that makes heavy work out of a slight subject, and an absence of characters to care about, or to adhere to as viewers.

Apart from box-office reasons, the casting choices are quixotic. Even if you can’t get Jim Carrey or Mike Myers, there are plenty of funny men with a dark side. Kevin Bacon (playing Lanny Morris) and Colin Firth (asVince Collins) may work as charismatic figures, even sex symbols, but the creaky, bowtie-snapping vaudevillian bits we see here suggest Collins and Morris were well out of date by the time the 50s rolled around. True, the cast steers the audience away from the book’s slavish devotion to the Martin-Lewis model, but unfortunately Egoyan fails to give us a credible substitute.

More problematicis the casting of Alison Lohman in the central role. In every film since Exotica (1994), Egoyan has dramatized situations of a vulnerable young protagonist ensnared by a middle-aged predator. (In 2002’s Armenian epic Ararat, the usual girl became a boy, played by David Alpay, in the customs-agent sequence modelled on Scheherazade.) Karen would seem a poor candidate for victimhood. She’s supposedly a worldly award-winning journalist with a million-dollar book advance, blustering with self-confidence and ready to ruin lives to get her story.

But Egoyan doesn’t seem comfortable with such an unsympathetic heroine. Taking a conceit from the book, Egoyan treats her as a Lewis Carroll character, a wide-eyed young woman in a world of surreal situations both seductive and grotesque. This strategy yields some delectable moments: in a scene in a Pan-Am first-class flight, Karen’s seat is spun around and, magically, she finds herself seated at a dining table for four, accompanied by the subject of her pursuit, Lanny, and two of his cronies, including his beloved butler (David Hayman). The scene has a playfulness that continues through Lanny’s eventual seduction of Karen.

The film’s characters also become stuck in a kind of prurience. Though in real life Lohman is in her mid-twenties, she’s still best known for playing teenagers (or, notably in Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men [2003], a woman who can pass as an adolescent) and here she looks like a schoolgirl playing undress-up. In a scene where Vince drugs her and photographs her having sex with an aspiring singer/prostitute (Kristen Adams) in an Alice in Wonderland outfit, the girl’s face apparently slick with Karen’s vaginal fluids, Lohman’s adolescent body makes the moment seem more perverse than it already is.

When not being vulnerable, Lohman’s character flips into being snappish and mercenary. Instead of suggesting such useful journalistic tools as intelligence or empathy, Lohman is merely single-minded in hounding her subjects. (Many critics wondered how a much more interesting actor of gravity and poise such as Sarah Polley might have been in the role.) On the morning after being druggedand blackmailed, Karen turns the tables, not through any appeal to Vince’s dregs of human feeling, but by waving the book contract like a bludgeon to put Vince back in his place.

Jumping back and forth between characters and time periods, Karen’s investigation feels seriously over-complicated, with a box full of lobsters, gangsters, a room-service girl with a tape recorder…the butler, the backlot, the buggery. To compensate, Egoyan amended Holmes’ pulpy narrative to provide Karen with a vulnerable backstory: as a child, she appeared as a polio victim on the Collins-Morris telethon that took place at the time of the murder (an indication of Lohman’s youthfulness, she plays Karen at 12). During the telethon, she shared a private moment with Lanny, where he tearfully apologized to her on air, a mystery she needs to understand. That idea of the secret cryptic exchange is typical of Egoyan’s interest in chains of consequence—though this, perhaps the film’s natural ending, appears too early, giving import to more lurid revelations.

Egoyan has also softened the character of the murdered girl—changing her from an extorting gossip columnist to an extorting coed—and emphasized Karen’s desire to protect the victim’s mother from the truth of her death. These changes do lessen the impact of the film’s major revelation—the solving of the crime—and are consistent with the usual redemptive finales Egoyan brings to his fractured narratives. In Where the Truth Lies, these humane moments feel insufficient, and seem like afterthoughts. They don’t answer the most troubling mystery: Why, apart from commercial reasons, did Egoyan set out to make a film that feels like a particularly confusing episode of Celebrity Justice?

Where the Truth Lies

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The Forsaken Land by Cameron Bailey

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