Where the Truth Lies is a 2005 Canadian/British drama film written and directed by Atom Egoyan. It stars Kevin Bacon, Colin Firth and Alison Lohman and is based on the 2003 novel of the same name by Rupert Holmes.
Plot
The film alternates between 1957, when Martin & Lewis-like comedy team Lanny Morris and Vince Collins are at the height of their success, and 1972, when journalist Karen O'Connor is determined to unravel the mystery of a young woman found dead in their hotel suite.
Immediately after hosting a 39-hour-long polio telethon in a Miami television studio, Morris and Collins fly north to discuss opening the showroom of a new Las Vegas hotel run by mobster Sally Sanmarco. In their Atlantic City hotel suite, the body of college student Maureen O'Flaherty is found in a bathtub, but since both men were en route to the hotel at the time she was murdered, neither is connected to the crime. Shortly after, their partnership is dissolved.
Fifteen years later, Karen -- who as a young polio survivor met the team at the telethon -- accepts a $1-million deal to ghostwrite Vince's autobiography. The project is complicated by the fact she keeps receiving anonymously sent chapters from a book about the one-time duo that Lanny himself has written.
Karen first meets Lanny, accompanied by his faithful valet Reuben, on a transcontinental flight, during which she introduces herself as Bonnie Trout, the name of the best friend with whom she's trading apartments. The two meet for dinner at a Chinese restaurant and later become intimate in Lanny's hotel.
Using her own name, Karen begins to work on the book. Complications arise when Vince invites her to dinner at his Los Angeles home and she learns Lanny will be joining them as well. She abruptly makes up an excuse to leave but meets Lanny in the driveway and her masquerade is revealed.
Vince agrees to continue with the book, but he has an ulterior motive. After plying Karen with wine and drugs, he manipulates her into having sexual intercourse with an aspiring singer named Alice and he photographs the two in compromising positions. He threatens to use the pictures to humiliate Karen if he is displeased with what she writes.
Investigating, she learns that Vince was bisexual and that Maureen was blackmailing Lanny and him with that knowledge. Lanny tried to bribe Maureen to keep quiet, unsuccessfully, so Reuben murdered her to cover it up. Vince commits suicide, and Karen decides not to publicly reveal the truth.
Production
Rupert Holmes admittedly patterned Vince and Lanny on his childhood idols, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, although the plot was pure fiction. Holmes called it a study of "the trust that must exist between any show business team who puts their lives in each other's hands" and "what happens when they no longer trust each other." Shortly after the novel was published, Holmes was asked who he envisioned playing the lead roles in a film adaptation. He suggested Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Kate Hudson, or Tom Cruise, Ben Stiller "and any actress in America who's shorter than they are." Tongue-in-cheek, he continued, "Or what about Kukla, Fran and Ollie? "This is probably why I'm not a studio head."[1]
Scenes in Vince's home were filmed at the Stahl House in Los Angeles, while the Brantford Airport stood in for Newark International Airport. Other exteriors were filmed in Toronto, with interiors shot at Shepperton Studios in Surrey.
The film's soundtrack includes "Josephine, Please No Lean on the Bell" performed by Louis Prima, "Spinning Wheel" by Blood, Sweat & Tears, "Oye Como Va" by Santana, and "Maggot Brain" by Funkadelic. "White Rabbit", written by Grace Slick and originally recorded by Jefferson Airplane, is featured prominently in one scene.
The film received an NC-17 rating in the United States due to scenes depicting a threesome and graphic lesbian sex. Egoyan condemned the MPAA decision as "a violent act of censorship," while Bacon stated, "I don't get it, when I see films (that) are extremely violent, extremely objectable sometimes in terms of the roles that women play, slide by with an R, no problem, because the people happen to have more clothes on."[2] Both suggested that homophobia may have played a role in the decision, as the film deals in part with repressed homosexuality. THINKFilm executives opted to release the film unrated in the United States. The rating later was a minor subject of analysis in the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated.
The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and was shown at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Woodstock Film Festival, and Festival do Rio in Brazil before going into theatrical release in Canada on October 7, 2005 and the United States the following week. It grossed $872,142 in North America and $2,605,536 in other markets for a total worldwide box office of $3,477,678.[3]
Cast
Critical reception
Manohla Dargis of the New York Times observed, "Mr. Egoyan . . . tends to stray from the storytelling straight and narrow, taking a generally metafictional approach to narrative. Here, he seems to want to deconstruct celebrity through the familiar mechanics of a murder mystery. Yet because he also doesn't want to be imprisoned by genre, he tries to shake loose its rules, much as Robert Altman did in 1973 with his laid-back take on Raymond Chandler's Long Goodbye. It almost works, at least in part . . . In the end, it is Mr. Egoyan's fealty to the novel, its feints and dodges, that proves the film's undoing." She called Kevin Bacon "excellent" but questioned "the calamitous miscasting" of Alison Lohman, "whose ingénue looks and uncontrolled voice are wildly out of sync with the film's other performances and self-consciously lurid atmosphere . . . [S]he has neither the chops nor the core mystery that might have made Mr. Egoyan's pseudo-David Lynch ambitions for his film fly."[4]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called it "film noir right down to the plot we can barely track; we're reminded of William Faulkner asking Raymond Chandler who did it in The Big Sleep and Chandler saying he wasn't sure . . . Atom Egoyan, no stranger to labyrinthine plots, makes this one into a whodunit puzzle crossed with some faraway echoes of Sunset Boulevard . . . I have seen Where the Truth Lies twice and enjoyed it more when I understood its secrets."[5]
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone rated the film one star, calling it a "monumental misfire" and adding, "This movie isn't over-the-top - it doesn't know where the top is. Trash addicts will eat up every graphic minute, even if they prefer to wait for the DVD."[6]
Ruthe Stein of the San Francisco Chronicle called the film "compulsively watchable even as laughably over-the-top moments start piling up. To be truthful, most of it is high-gloss trash. I'm prepared to recommend Truth despite this - or maybe because of it . . . Bacon has the showier role, and he wrings everything he can out of it. But Firth is equally impressive . . . Truth's descent into camp happens mostly during the scenes set in the '70s. Lohman is a big part of the problem . . . she's so shrill and annoying as Karen that you end up wishing she were the one floating in that tub."[7]
Todd McCarthy of Variety called the film "unconvincing" and "jumbled" and added, "Fractured narrative devices are further encumbered by multiple narration sources, incidental characters who function as mere devices, and uncertain time frames. More bothersome still is the stiff, on-topic nature of most of the film; with Karen in full interrogation mode nearly all the time, scenes and characters are rarely allowed to breathe and develop of their own accord . . . a problem unrelieved by Lohman's performance, which reveals nothing beneath the surface or between the lines. Bacon and Firth both prove more than adept at conveying their characters' seamy sides, which at least lends weight to the distasteful revelations in which the story is rooted, and are reasonably effective overall in cutting the desired profiles of glib entertainers taking full advantage of fame's perks."[8]
Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian rated the film two out of five stars, saying it had "rich potential for suspense, for drama, for comedy, for tragedy, for historical colour, for just about everything. Yet in the most perplexing way, Egoyan's movie doesn't properly deliver on any of these. It is muddled, over-wrought, and somehow too cerebral and fastidious to tell the story straight . . . There are diverting moments but it adds up to nothing in particular. The question is not so much where the truth lies, but why we should care in the first place."[9]
Phillip French of The Observer called the film "a rich brew that draws on Citizen Kane and Rashomon" and ultimately "holds the attention and makes us want to know the outcome."[10]
Awards and nominations
Atom Egoyan was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
The Directors Guild of Canada honored Phillip Barker for Outstanding Production Design in a Feature Film and nominated Egoyan for Outstanding Direction of a Feature Film, Susan Shipton for Outstanding Picture Editing of a Feature Film, and the movie itself for Outstanding Feature Film.
Egoyan won the Genie Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and the film was nominated in the Art Direction/Production Design, Editing, Sound, and Original Score categories.
DVD release
On February 8, 2006, Sony Pictures released two versions of the film, one rated R and the other unrated, on DVD. Both are in anamorphic widescreen and closed captioned. The unrated version includes an audio track in French. Bonus features on both include The Making of Where The Truth Lies (which has neither commentary nor dialogue) and deleted scenes.
References
External links
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Films directed by Atom Egoyan |
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Howard in Particular (1979) · After Grad with Dad (1980) · Peep Show (1981) · Open House (1982) · Men: A Passion Playground (1985) · Looking for Nothing (1988) · Montréal vu par... / Montreal Sextet segment: En passant (In Passing) (1991) · A Portrait of Arshile (1995) · The Line (2000) · Diaspora (2001) · Chacun son cinéma / To Each His Cinema segment: Artaud Double Bill (2007) ·
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