The Invention of Lying
12A, Nationwide
The Invention of Lying is Ricky Gervais’s first film as a Hollywood writer and director — well, co-writer and co-director, with newcomer Matthew Robinson — and it is a disappointment. Probably, it won’t be the biggest or most tragic disappointment of your life. If you’ve always dreamed of becoming a champion ice dancer, say, and you then go and lose a leg in an industrial accident, I imagine that will be a bigger and more tragic disappointment, but this is a disappointment all the same. I just wanted to put it into some kind of context.
This is what you would call, I suppose, a high-concept Hollywood comedy and, here, the concept is an alternative reality where lying does not exist, and everyone speaks the blunt truth, so there are no stories and no religion which, the film suggests, is the greatest fiction of all. (Listen, I’m not telling the Archbishop of Canterbury. You do it.) How can there be a world like this? Why? Look, just don’t beat yourself up about the logic, because there really isn’t any: no external logic, no internal logic — how come, if this is a world where everyone is bound by honesty, there’s a bent cop? — and no logic that was in a minute ago but now seems to have gone out, so can I take a message? Actually, the opening ten, maybe 15 minutes are promising. In this alternative reality, even advertisers can’t lie, so when a bus goes past advertising: ‘Pepsi…for when you can’t get Coke,’ I did laugh. And waiters can’t lie, so when one confesses that he had a small sip from a drink, I did laugh. But you can’t keep laughing at the same joke over and over and over and over — well, you can, but you’re probably not normal and are quite annoying.
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