British comedy wunderkid Ricky Gervais must take the lion's share of the blame for this. He not only stars in but also produced and co-wrote and co-directed the film with newcomer Matthew Robinson, and it all seems to have gone to his head. Gervais is undoubtedly a very talented comedy writer and actor but he's not Orson Welles. THE INVENTION OF LYING shows him very clearly in over his head.
He plays Mark Bellison, an overweight loser in a world where everyone always tells the truth about everything. The idea of lying just doesn't exist until Bellison finds himself in a particularly stressful situation and tells an untruth. The result is miraculous. It gets him exactly what he wants because no one can conceive that he is being anything less than honest, and this initial success inspires Mark to reshape his entire life into what he wants it to be rather than what it is. At the top of his list is winning the love of Anne McDoogles (Jennifer Garner), a highly desirable young lady who, by mutual consent, is out of his league.
This is where everything in the story starts to lose focus.
Mark decides he's not going to lie to Anne to get what he wants from her, although he does lie to her about plenty of other things including the existence of "the man in the sky" who controls everything in the world.
Although it's never explicitly confirmed, it's obvious that the Man in the Sky is God, and Mark finds himself cast in the role of God's messenger by a public fanatically eager to learn more. But the story isn't very clear on whether it's suggesting that Mark invents religion as well as lying, or whether there's an inherent connection between the two.
At more or less the same time as the focus fades the same thing happens to the comedy. THE INVENTION OF LYING is never laugh out loud funny but once the apparent invention of religion is added to the mix it ceases to be anything more than very intermittently slightly mildly amusing. The situation's not helped by the oddball cast who fail to gell or demonstrate the slightest talent for genuinely funny comedy. Cameos from Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ed Norton, Tina Fey, Christopher Guest, Justin Bateman, and Rob Lowe all add nothing to the proceedings, and a brief scene between Gervais's "Extras" co-stars Stephen Marchant and Shaun Williamson only serves to suggest what might have been.
The film's an even bigger disappointment because it was so badly missold by the cinema trailers. They promised a sharp, witty and very dry comedy but what we get is a stillborn mish-mash of comedy styles with barely a hearty laugh to be had and even less of a story.
Extremely unsatisfying.
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