PLOT: In the 1970s, a young journalist investigates two singer-comics who starred in the 1950s. A long-suppressed scandal -- the dead body in their bathtub after a night of drugs and sex -- looms large.
Atom Egoyan's latest opus, the sexually charged murder mystery Where The Truth Lies, is an immaculate conception for all its naughty content.
Lush, sleek, beautifully conceived and photographed, the film is a glossy artifact of high cinema. With its intellectual conceits, time-shifting story and challenging ideas, it is a film with a mainstream sheen and an arthouse complexity.
But Where The Truth Lies is also cold and distant and sterile. All despite the naked sexcapades that include orgies and plenty of bare flesh, both male and female.
We are left with a contemporary film noir lacking the passion of the noir genre of the 1940s and '50s. Noirs used to rumble, bark, grind. The grit in the characters was as abrasive as sandpaper. Egoyan's film is too clean for the dirty little lies it hides. And only some of the characters belong here.
Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon do belong, and both give edgy performances that toughen the film's spine and make this flawed movie worth watching.
In Firth's case, his work may even be a shocker, given how venal his character becomes. Mr. Darcy was never this mean, this callous.
As the ugly American Lanny Morris and the slick Briton Vince Collins, Firth and Bacon portray singer-comics of the 1950s. They are a star-studded duo, versatile entertainers like Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, although this is not their real-life story.
In the movie, Lanny & Vince command nightclubs, flirt with the babes in the audience. They also host their own telethon, ostensibly to raise money for needy children, really to raise their likability quotient.
After-hours, off stage, they booze it up, do drugs and do every woman willing to strip and perform sexual acts, sometimes in group orgies. No rules, no limits, no morality. The film explores the changing nature of celebrity and excess.
One night, one woman (Rachel Blanchard in a brave support role in which her sexuality is used as a dangerous weapon) ends up naked and dead in the bathtub.
Two decades later, a young journalist (Alison Lohman) with a tangential connection to the duo is given the chance to write a tell-all book about their mercurial past career. The film, written by Egoyan and based on a novel by American Rupert Holmes, uses Lohman's awkward, often ill-advised investigation to expose the harsh truths and the lies.
Lanny & Vince, like Martin & Lewis, split up long ago in weird circumstances. In the 1970s era, each now has his own agenda, his own memory of what really happened. And how did that woman end up naked and dead?
Egoyan, as he often does, time shifts to re-create the story, stripping away layers and forcing characters to reveal themselves in fragments. In this case, however, he relies on a catalyst who is not up to the task. This is where the film fails.
Lohman, looking like a teenager and carrying no weight on screen in this role, is woefully miscast. She is impossible to believe as anything but a flyweight, except in her surprising lesbian encounter. No one would give this girlish woman a million bucks to write an expose. She is no match for Firth's character, so the plot is unbalanced, even unhinged.
There is also a serious problem with the climax-epilogue of the story. As Egoyan tells the tale, he changes the emotional emphasis of the piece in the final scene. The film turns out not to be what we thought it was about all along. Bad move.
BOTTOM LINE: Played at the Cannes and Toronto filmfests. While it boasts many fine qualities, including Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon's lusty performances as a musical comedy duo, Atom Egoyan's opus falls short of satisfaction.
(This film is rated 18-A)
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