In Theaters: The Invention of Lying

The words "lie," "truth," and "honesty" are never uttered in The Invention of Lying, save for the "L"-word's invocation during co-writer/director/star Ricky Gervais's cheeky, disembodied voiceover introduction. It's a brain-cramping conceit for much of the film, in which self-admitted "loser" Mark (Gervais) upturns society by instinctively formulating the world's first fib. It makes him a few hundred bucks richer and theoretically more powerful than any man on Earth. Of course, he has done more than simply invent lying; he has also imposed the deep, permanent wrinkle of morality on a populace without guile. It's not nearly as funny as Gervais thinks, but like all that's ostensibly moral, that might be a good thing.

While we do chuckle at Gervais's everyman woe, we reel even more from the implications. He's doomed from the start on his quest for the love of Anna (Jennifer Garner, rotating a few facial contortions in search of a character), who cites his height, weight and snub nose among her reasons to not date him. His secretary (Tina Fey) and office rival (Rob Lowe) disclose with natural candor that he's to lose his job and that nobody really likes him. He rides the elevator every morning with a neighbor (Jonah Hill) who ruminates on his failed suicide attempts. Empowered with the lie, and facing his mum crippled with anxiety on her deathbed (doctor Jason Bateman's scalding bedside manner doesn't help), he fabricates Heaven on the spot to help alleviate her suffering.

The resulting paradox of a "Man in the Sky" makes Mark an accidental messiah -- a distinction Gervais and fellow writer/director Matthew Robinson embrace with varying effectiveness. Mostly it's a fascinating starting point for the viewer to undo the calculus of their universe and, of course, our own. Gervais mines Woody Allen until he arrives at the comic's famously atheistic bedrock, taping fake commandments to tablet-like Pizza Hut boxes in his first attempt to debrief the world about God. (The product placement is an especially clever angle, finally imbuing brands with the spiritual power they never had with pre-lie slogans like, "Pepsi: When they don't have Coke.") Mark's tinkering with the lie complicates things even further with Anna, whom he instructs against premarital sex when Lowe's archnemesis comes a-courtin' just for spite. Thus the basis for the Invention of Hypocrisy, the Invention of Puritanism, the Invention of Sexual Neurosis, and really, the Invention of Western Civilization.

Which really is funny in the context of Mark's screenwriting job, where he repudiates the hopelessness of subjects like the Black Plague in favor of the more compelling, profitable fruits of imagination. (He invented that, too, by the way.) That makes The Invention of Lying much less a license for cruel, credulous zingers than a sweet tribute to artifice in all its flawed glory. Sure, it's the stuff of holy wars, political scandals, romantic devastation, economic ruin and almost always a guaranteed catalyst of despair. But it's ultimately what makes us human, a necessity both excused and satirized in Gervais and Robinson's text. They can't pull both off equally, resulting in more of a moral victory than a creative one. Then again, moral is good. Maybe that was the goal all along.