Liar, Liar

Just before heading out on my trip, I finally got out to the theater to see The Invention of Lying, the new comedy starring Ricky Gervais. The title is the premise; in a world where everyone speaks the utter truth all the time, Gervais' character is the first man able to tells lies.

It's a premise with a good bit of mileage in it. Early on, it's mined for laughs, as the character explores the power of lying, and the things you can get for yourself by lying for sex, lying for money, lying just generally for personal gain. Then it moves into an area where the character tries to act more altruistically, lying to help make other people happy.

And then the quirky little comedy gets subversive. It turns out that Gervais (also co-writer and co-director of the movie) has some pretty specific message to convey. And if you want to see them for yourself in context, skip the rest of this paragraph. The framework of lying is really a platform to comment first on religion, and perhaps even more profoundly on the way people deny their own happiness to pursue things they think they're supposed to want. It's pretty heady stuff for the average comedy, and it does make you stop and think.

But the thing is, the movie is really only funny early, and really only profound late. In its effort to be both, the film does both "fairly well," but neither excellently. At any given moment, the laughs are king, or the message is. It's not an oil-and-water relationship, overall, but neither it is a chocolate-and-peanut-butter one.

Still, the fact that it's Ricky Gervais -- and that there's a deeper meaning to it all -- means that a lot of prominent actors wanted to come out to play. It seems as though people lined up just to have a line or two in the film. In addition to the major characters played by Jennifer Garner, Jonah Hill, Louis C.K., and Rob Lowe, you can also see Jeffrey Tambor, Tina Fey, John Hodgman, Edward Norton, Jason Bateman, Christopher Guest, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. It's a pretty cool cast.

I think it's definitely worth seeing, though perhaps I found myself wanting ever more, given just how good all the different ingredients were. I rate it a B-. It's probably one to rent later, if you don't catch it in theaters now.