The Invention of Lying
The invention of lyring
Cast: Ricky Gervais, Jennifer Garner, Jonah Hill, Rob Lowe, Louis C.K.
Producers: Lynda Obst, Oly Obst, Ricky Gervais, Dan Lin
Genres: Comedy
Running Time: 1 hr. 40 min
Release Date: October 2nd, 2009 (wide)
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language including some sexual material and a drug reference.
The first half-hour of “The Invention of Lying,” co-directed and co-written by Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson, is so sharply fresh, clever and laugh-out-loud hilarious that you can’t help but wonder how they’ll sustain it for another hour.
To be honest, they can’t.
The early reels are a marvel of sustained comic invention and verbal wit, with a dash of speculative humor that borders on science fiction. Bus ads and building signage offer priceless sight gags (a retirement home bills itself as “a sad place for old hopeless people”), while the movies Mark writes are essentially unvarnished history lessons, read directly to the camera with nary an ounce of Hollywood artifice.
But everything changes, including the pic’s tone and momentum, when Mark, fired and broke, catches a lucky break by telling the world’s first lie. Shocked by his newfound powers, Mark finds himself the hero of a sort of reverse “Liar Liar,” in which his every fabrication is accepted at face value. Before long, Mark is back at work, Anna renews her interest in him and — in a twist that approaches Capra-esque levels of sentimental lunacy — he becomes a celebrity with his revelatory, gotta-be-true insights into the nature of God, morality and the afterlife.
Things admittedly get clunky in the third act, when they attempt to work a convincing Gervais-Garner romance into the glib proceedings, but the truth is perfection’s a minor quibble with the likes of Fey, Jeffrey Tambor, Rob Lowe, Jason Bateman, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christopher Guest, Louis C.K. and Edward Norton providing expert comic backup.
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