The Invention of Lying (2009)

The truth hurts. Especially if you’re a chubby little loser with a snub nose living in a world where no one ever fibs. Mark Bellison (Ricky Gervais), the aforementioned schlub, inhabits just such a place in The Invention of Lying.

That is, until he tells the world’s first whopper. You see, Mark has recently been dissed (in person and over email) by a beautiful woman named Anna (Jennifer Garner) for being way out of his league. He’s just been fired from his job as a screenwriter working on a true-to-life retelling of the black plague, and he’s on the verge of being evicted from his sad, little apartment. Pushed to this breaking point, something in his brain’s synapses (no, really, they show us his brain’s synapses) misfires and out of Mark’s mouth tumbles the first-ever tall tale.

Mark suddenly realizes that he can use his new-found ability to make his world into just about anything he wants. So after convincing Anna to grant him a second date — even though she is still clearly out of his league — Mark sits down to write a screenplay about the plague that also features aliens and giant robots. Naturally, it’s a hit! And the money and fame start rolling in.

Somewhere along the way, he turns himself into a prophet, sweetly crafting the story of a happy, peaceful afterlife for the sake of a terrified, dying old woman. He also tells of a “man in the sky” who’s in charge of building and decorating each and every person’s mansion and keeping the party going once we’ve shuffled off this mortal coil. It’s a story that changes the world (not just his own) but not always for the better.

A treatise on lying, imagination, and the need for God in the guise of a rom-com? This is high-concept stuff, really. I just wish that the script, as penned by Gervais and newcomer Matthew Robinson, featured less concept and more humor.

What humor there is relies heavily on the running honesty gimmick. Instead of catchy names like “Shady Pines,” retirement homes are simply called “A Sad Place for Hopeless Old People.” Advertisements for Coke tell you to drink it because “it’s really famous.” The ones for Pepsi admit that their iteration of brown sugar-water is “for when they don’t have Coke.” Cute. But it’s certainly not funny enough to be the lone gag for all 99 minutes of the film. It actually gets stale before Mark ever utters an untruth.

Moreover, all this truth-telling has its downside. It’s not just that Gervais’s characters doesn’t lie (or exaggerate or sugarcoat). The folks in this world are pathologically honest and feel the need to spout whatever is running through their heads no matter how offensive, disturbing, or cruel those thoughts might be. No wonder Frank (Jonah Hill), Mark’s co-schlub, spends the early part of the film deciding how to off himself. Not being lied to about your inadequacies is one thing. Living in a world where it’s perfectly acceptable to have everyone point them out to you is another thing altogether. There really needed to be more laughs piled on to make that bit of misery palatable.

Instead, it’s star power that’s piled on. Gervais and Robinson also co-direct a cast that includes Louis C.K., Tina Fey, and Rob Lowe and features some reasonably amusing cameos from Jason Bateman, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Edward Norton, and Christopher Guest, who all do the best they can with their two-dimensional roles. Even Garner is able to sustain that doe-eyed face of wonderment for the entirety of the film. It gets annoying — particularly during the last half-hour of the film that she spends waffling about whether she could really be in love with a chubby little snub-nosed loser — but at least she’s consistent.

It’s clear, though, that The Invention of Lying is Gervais’ picture. And rightfully so. Even in this stinker of a film, he is every bit as enchanting in the loveable loser role as Seth Rogen is in Knocked Up; his comic timing is as agile as Steve Carrell’s in Evan Almighty; and he’s got that soft-spoken British accent to boot. But it’s a shame that he couldn’t find a better film vehicle than this overly ambitious and ultimately unfunny one to hitch his wagon. And that’s no lie.