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.
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