On Sunday, during a weekend trip home, I saw The Invention of Lying with my girlfriend. My girlfriend said she had expected the picture to be funnier, but I just thoroughly enjoyed it. I laughed. I cried. I smiled with simple joy.
Something I had read before I even saw the film is that it was shot in Lowell, Massachusetts, near my hometown. For this reason most of the locations felt very familiar, and I even recognized a specific landmark – the headquarters of The Sun.
Ricky Gervais, co-creator and star of the BBC sitcom The Office co-wrote, co-directed, and starred in The Invention of Lying. But although Gervais’s character remains the most compelling throughout the story (and manages to make both himself and Gervais look like a genius), the film features stars left and right in a variety of roles, from Tina Fey playing a disgruntled office assistant to Philip Seymour Hoffman as a Bartender. And somehow they all seem to belong together.
The film takes place in a parallel universe where nobody has ever told a lie or created a fiction of any kind. Then our protagonist, in a desparate crisis, tells a blatant lie – the world’s first – and discovers a newfound ability to change his world. But he doesn’t stop at lying. In fact, the film could have been titled The Invention of Lying, Fiction, Thinking Beyond Appearances, Spirituality, and Other Fun Stuff. But that would be an absurdly long title.
The film manages to tackle skillfully several tough topics: suicide, the loneliness of elderly people (who in the film inhabit a place called A Sad Place for Hopeless Old People), death, religious debate, and ulterior motives in marriage. Most of the time it’s funny, occasionally it’s very sad, and sometimes it’s simply cheerful. But it’s always compelling. As a viewer I give this movie my approval.
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