Lying, American-Style

I DON’T KNOW how best to convey my feelings about Ricky Gervais
(it’s hard, you see, because I might start crying and never stop),
except to say that The Office—and, to a lesser extent,
Extras—is THE most perfectly constructed piece of art in
my favorite artistic medium, television. Not a single comedic or
emotional misstep in the whole goddamn thing. Miraculous. Changed the
way I think about comedy. AND LIFE. “Hey, Ricky Gervais, breathe into
this rag. Why am I wearing a wedding dress? Shhh. Go to sleep.” They’re
like that. My feelings. (Note: I am not actually a kidnapper and
rapist! Ha ha!)

So aaanyway, of course I was hoping that The Invention of
Lying—Gervais’ directorial film debut—would be another
masterpiece of impeccable social satire. But it’s not. It’s also not
the wacky romantic comedy that the trailers promise: The Invention
of Lying is more of a super-stylized, science-fictional thought
experiment.

Gervais stars as Mark Bellison, a below-average joe and the first
dishonest man in a world without lies, where “there’s no such thing as
deceit or flattery or fiction.” In a purely credulous society, that
power amounts to mind control: Gervais can tell a suicidal neighbor
that “everything’s going to be okay,” and it is; or inform the bank
teller that he has a million dollars, and he does. The alternate
universe Gervais creates is weird—its citizens don’t just exhibit
complete honesty, but a complete lack of impulse control. First date
banter goes like this: “Hi, you’re early. I was just masturbating.”
“That made me think of your vagina.” (Why don’t you just NOT say that
out loud!?) And courtship turns into balls-out eugenics: “I don’t want
little fat kids with snub noses.”

Of course, Bellison doesn’t quite do the right things with his
newfound omnipotence: He winds up inventing religion (“there’s a man in
the sky who watches everything you do” and “everyone gets a mansion
after they die”), and gets stuck in the old love-potion quandary (if
you trick someone into loving you, does it really count?). The conceit
makes for some brilliant moments of literality: a nursing home becomes
“A SAD PLACE FOR HOPELESS OLD PEOPLE”; advertising loses all meaning
(“Coke: It’s very famous” vs. “Pepsi: For when they don’t have Coke”).
The cast is a who’s who of the Best People in America Ever (Louis CK,
Jeffrey Tambor, Jason Bateman, John Hodgman). All of these things are
good.

But it doesn’t quite come together. You can feel the foreign hands
in there, changing Gervais’ rhythms a bit—glossing,
Hollywoodizing, homogenizing. The sentimental scenes are jarringly
mawkish—hard to watch—and the ending is a typical Hollywood
romcom failure. He should’ve stayed in England.