Screwball Sabotage

The Invention of Lying

Directed by Ricky Gervais, Matthew Robinson

Runtime: 99 min.

“Lying” in the title of The Invention of Lying refers to mankind’s major systems of belief. Ricky Gervais, the film’s star and co-writer/co-director, doesn’t do philosophical scrutiny or hermeneutic analysis; he merely undermines religion using the glib condescension of Hollywood leftists who assume the only people who still believe in God live in fly-over America. A hostile new trend has begun.

Gervais (and his writing-directing partner Matthew Robinson) conjure a world without “deceit, flattery or fiction”—a concept derived from John Lennon’s highly questionable (though rarely questioned) song “Imagine.” The result: a half-assed version of what used to be called Cloudcuckooland. Every character, including Mark Bellison (Gervais), a screenwriter for Lecture Films Motion Picture Studios, is bluntly, guilelessly honest—until Mark discovers that the benefits of lying are both monetary and ego-boosting. But The Invention of Lying isn’t moralistic screwball farce like Carole Lombard playing a pathological liar in True Confession (1937). Instead of exposing Mark’s own egotism when he accidentally becomes a guru, it sentimentalizes his inferiority complex; his attraction to a woman “way out of my league” (goofy, beadyeyed Jennifer Garner) replaces concern with values or ethics.

Beneath its pandering, underdog selfpity (Gervais pays a tubby, brown-suited loser who eventually loiters in lanky Jesus hair and beard), the movie intentionally caters to dominant political fashion. It is a secularist farce, designed to deflate religion as superstition or inanity.

Few moviegoers looking for laughs bargain for this kind of sabotage. Sadly, even fewer cultural watchdogs will notice the offense.That’s because agnosticism and atheism have become commonplace in popular culture. Even Ivan Reitman’s antireligious Year One glided by critics as merely weak farce.The difference here is Gervais twists the pop-mysticism of the Bruce/Evan Almighty movies into glum satire. Society’s naifs appear as gullible as they are candid—which reveals Gervais’ deep-seated contempt. Physically resembling W.C. Fields, he temperamentally recalls Bill Maher. Confusing honesty with a lack of decorum, mistaking candor for lack of self-control only suggests Gervais has been in showbiz too long.

The first of the many poor jokes in The Invention of Lying has Gervais poking fun at Hollywood: “Testing…Testing…over the credits that no one cares about.” Weak jokes about stars as “Big-name readers” are contradicted by cameos from Edward Norton, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Jason Bateman.Yet when Mark delivers his mocking sermon on God and the Afterlife, his commandments actually flaunt Pizza Hut box covers to the assembled multitudes: Mock religion. Promote capitalism.

It will be ugly irony if this film is received more enthusiastically than the Coens’ A Serious Man, where a bar mitzvah sequence—the loveliest, most conflicted bar mitzvah since Sunday Bloody Sunday—showed sophisticated respect for faith and tradition. Gervais’ ridicule proves his lack of sophistication. Not only the most brutally photographed movie of the year, The Invention of Lying is so foully directed and carelessly acted it ultimately proves disingenuous. Gervais fails to address Hollywood mendacity—the process of misrepresentation and delusion that conditions audiences to take cinema for granted and enjoy crap.