The Invention of Lying (2009), featuring a brief review of The Happening (2008)

The Invention of Lying was by far the worst movie I have seen in years.

Evidently Ricky Gervais, who co-wrote and co-directed this ridiculously stupefying waste of celluloid, completely and utterly failed to realize that you cannot make a film which tries to make big statements about the nature of faith, honesty, and deception without properly defining these terms. 

Time for a huge tangent.  Remember M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening?  (Or really, any of his movies after Unbreakable?)  In The Happening, M Night’s basic premise was that if plants release a chemical into the air which enters people’s systems and disables their self-preservation instinct, everyone will violently kill themselves by whatever means directly and immediately available to them.  Just to be clear, we are supposed to understand that:

P (plant chemical) + H (human brain) => -I (lack of self-preservation instinct) => S (suicide by ridiculous means like laying down in the path of an industrial lawn mower or bashing one’s head against a wall until death)

Somewhere between the –I and S portions of that chain of events, we encounter a huge error.  Logically, losing the instinct to preserve one’s own well-being does not necessarily imply that everyone is suddenly driven to suicide.  Rather, what it would mean is that people just wouldn’t duck if something came flying at them, or they wouldn’t run away from danger, or they wouldn’t experience the fear and cringing reactions normally associated with risky and dangerous situations.  Not so much with the impromptu stabbing themselves in the neck with chopsticks and hanging themselves from trees.  Another sad swing-and-a-miss for Mr. Shyamalan. 

So back to The Invention of Lying.  Gervais asks us to go along with the idea that in a world where people haven’t evolved the ability to lie, each person just says what is on his/her mind at any given moment without any self-censoring whatsoever.  Here’s the problem: blabbing insults and character-impugning personal facts stream-of-consciousness style is NOT the same thing as being unable to tell a lie.  Unfortunately this type of incident is what the movie relies on to produce “humor” throughout. 

For example, when in the first scene of the movie Jennifer Garner’s character answers her door and randomly blurts out “I was just masturbating,” we note that this was not, in fact, in response to any query about what she was doing.  It was just something she said off the top of her head.  It had nothing to do with whether or not she was able to lie about what she was doing.  No one even asked her what she was doing!  And can I also note that not one person in the mostly high school student audience so much as chuckled at this zinger of an opening punchline? 

Gervais not only befouls the definition of honesty from the get go; he also conflates truth with belief in a way that proves highly problematic to his anti-religion argument which comes out of the woodwork later on.  Gervais’s character at one point makes up a set of rules and fundamentals that are meant to resemble the basic premises of Christianity (there is a “man in the sky” who controls everything, if you do bad stuff you go to hell, there is heaven which is the reward for doing good stuff, etc).  Of course everyone in the world believes him because they are not aware that he is able to say something untrue.  But religion, at least for the faithful, has never been about truth and fact.  It’s about belief.  It’s a FAITH, not a science experiment, not a force with empirical evidence that can be quantified and replicated in a lab. You can’t win an argument against a faithful person by trying to prove them wrong.  It’s just completely pointless. 

A lot of good actors got dragged into this ridiculous mess.  Perhaps the most offensive to me was Tina Fey’s character, whose few crass lines feature the never funny use of the word faggot, which was apparently supposed to be the punchline of the joke in and of itself.  What a waste.

Literally the only funny moment of the film was probably originally an outtake.  It was a split second shot of Philip Seymour Hoffman (who plays a bartender) smiling with a wedge of lime covering his teeth.  The only time I laughed during the entire movie. 

I can’t even say that this movie was unfortunately terrible because everything that was terrible about it was a conscious choice made by the people who put it together and acted it out. 

I wish I could have my ten dollars and one hundred minutes back.