Where The Truth Lies (2005)
It's almost as if the female is there to mediate the eroticism inherent in the male dynamic. Like in any movie ever!
The concept of “Canadian Popular Cinema” has been dismissed as a contradiction in terms, but is such derisive sentiment towards Telefilm’s zeitgeist-capturing ambitions justified? To find out, Canuckbusters looks back on the last decade or so of Canadian “commercial” cinema.
Stars Americans Would Recognize: Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth star as Lanny and Vince, a popular ’50s comedy duo who sing at nightclubs, star in comedies, and host telethons for muscular dystro—er, polio. But there are crucial differences between Lanny/Vince and Martin/Lewis: Lanny is British, and Vince’s stage persona seems to be that of a greasy sexual predator. Bacon is better at capturing the offstage Jerry Lewis than the onstage one.
Canadian Stars: Rachel Blanchard appears as the corpse, plus Brooklyn, New York-born Canadian film great Maury Chaykin appears as a mob boss.
Canadian Celebrity Cameos: Seán Cullen has a cameo as the announcer of the Lanny And Vince Polio Telethon; Arsinée Khanjian and Don McKellar play publishing executives, with the latter sporting a John Holmes moustache.
Strombo Cameo? No.
The Plot: Sure, The Three Stooges all slept in the same bed, and yes, Abbott and Costello looked perfectly presentable from certain angles (well, maybe just Abbott), but it’s fair to say that Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were the first of the major comedy teams that an average person could imagine in a sexual context. Well, at least until the Frantics came along.
In still-unsurpassed levels of homoerotic bro-itude, Martin and Lewis often hugged, pinched, and even kissed each other on the cheeks during their TV, nightclub, and movie appearances. But hey, don’t get any ideas, pal, ’cause in every interview he’s ever given (most recently in a 2011 GQ profile, but also in every interview ever), Lewis is here to tell you that he has, in fact, done it with a wide variety of girls, sexually speaking. Multiple, even. The GQ article never gets into it, but here’s hoping Lewis was at least gentlemanly enough to refer to his conquests as “NICE LAAAAADIES!”
But I digress. Wading through these murky waters, Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies takes place 15 years after the acrimonious breakup of Vince And Lanny, a Martin And Lewis-esque comedy team, after the discovery of a mysterious dead woman in the team’s hotel room sated the public’s appetite for their shenanigans and wackiness. Karen O’Connor (Alison Lohman) is “a young journalist, with a few awards, a couple of cover stories, and a desperate need to prove myself” (as Lohman breathily intones in the rather on-the-nose narration), trying to persuade Vince to participate in writing a book that might finally unravel the mystery. By chance, she also runs into Lanny, and, after assuming a false identity, falls into bed with him. A tangled web of sex, drugs, and murder follows suit.
What Where the Truth Lies teaches us about Canada (if anything): Until Lewis was recently ousted as host, his annual MDA Labor Day Telethon was the Brigadoon of TV broadcasts. Once a year, no matter what had happened in the intervening decades, Telethon viewers were magically transported back to the late ’60s/early ’70s, when Lewis was a box-office power, Tony Orlando was pulling in big ratings, and the likes of Don Rickles and Phyllis Diller were big enough to wade through more than 21 hours of jugglers, acrobats, and ventriloquists to watch. With his slick hair, fancy jewelry, Borscht Belt humour, and Sinatra-esque offscreen demeanor, Lewis was (and is) the perfect symbol of a certain kind of showbiz. Likewise, for impressionable kids of who grew up in a three-channel world, the Telethon must have seemed like the epitome of celebrity culture.
With its $25 million budget, Hollywood stars, and pulpy sensationalism, Where The Truth Lies was touted as Egoyan’s bid for the mainstream (inasmuch as any NC-17 period piece involving the sexual dynamic of Martin and Lewis—sorry, “Martin” and “Lewis”—can be considered “mainstream”).
Based on a potboiler novel by Rupert Holmes, the wacky neo-noir story—with its ludicrous plot twists and gratuitous sex—is an odd fit for Egoyan, whose reputation is one of icy intelligence. Sometimes it feels as if Egoyan were a little ashamed of the material, as he moves the film at an unwisely languid pace with theme-underlining narration to show that this is a high-toned meditation on appearance/reality, the cult of celebrity, etc. We can’t help wondering what wonders a master vulgarian like Paul Verhoeven would have done with this script.
But, while Where The Truth Lies is hardly Egoyan’s finest hour, it’s not unlikeable. And here’s why: It has a sense of naiveté that is downright charming. Lohman’s character—and, by extension, Egoyan—are still shocked to discover that childhood heroes are not always what they seem to be, and beloved comedians could secretly be violent, sexual sociopaths. In an early scene, Firth brings an anti-Semitic audience member backstage and beats him to a pulp while Bacon clowns around onstage; the juxtaposition between the violence and comedy is not doubt intended to expose the dark side of popular culture, but feels more like warmed-over Scorsese. A third-act surprise, in which (SPOILER) we find out that Firth tried to have sex with Bacon, depends on us being wowed by the not-terribly revolutionary notion that male comedy teams might be a little, gulp, homoerotic. Hell, the very use of a 60-year-old pop-culture phenomenon like Martin And Lewis as a symbol for the entertainment industry is touchingly antiquated.
It may sound condescending, but the film’s naiveté is something we can identify with. Who doesn’t enjoy skimming the latest unpleasant Lewis interview with the morbid fascination of someone finding out a childhood hero is a human being? Where The Truth Lies feels like an outsider’s perspective on its subject. It is to the seamy underbelly of American show business what the Jerry Lewis Telethon was to show business itself—a little worshipful, and a little removed. And (to answer your implied question), maybe, just maybe ... it’s that outsider’s perspective that marks Where The Truth Lies as distinctly Canadian.
Next Month: A Canadian movie that you folks actually paid money to see: Trailer Park Boys: The Movie (2006).
