It’s definitely better if
professionals know more than laypeople do about their chosen field. I’m not
going to tell a bartender how to make a drink, and I don’t expect to be shaken
awake during an operation by a surgeon who needs my help. That’s why it was
very disconcerting to watch acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan’s rather
engrossing new whodunit, Where the Truth
Lies, only to realize early on that he had made a fatal mistake.
We meet the unbridled Lanny Morris
(the unparalleled Kevin Bacon) and the somewhat restrained Vince Collins (Colin
Firth, perfect in the less showy role), a comedy team in the mold of Jerry
Lewis and Dean Martin, as they’re about to kick off the 1957 Veteran’s Day
Polio Telethon (get it?). Something is obviously troubling the two men, their
faces flickering with mad, sad, pensive, and scared, but if crowd reaction is
any indication, they are at the pinnacle of their popularity. Morris and
Collins will mug and pander the money out of people for the duration of the
charity event, and soon after they will go their separate ways. For 15 years,
only one person will know exactly how their dead blonde playmate got that way
just prior to showtime.
Flash forward to 1972, where a
journalist named Karen (Alison Lohman) is trying to piece together the
Morris-Collins split. She’s got a healthy publishing advance, convenient
ethics, and access to Collins, who has agreed to tell his story. Morris is penning
his memoirs as well, portions of which have been finding their way to Karen.
And in one of those only-in-the-movies type of coincidences, Karen has met the
men before. She’ll shake the skeletons out of their closet but risk becoming
part of the story.
The serious slip I refer to, though,
is the casting of Lohman. She’s been impressive in films like White Oleander and Big Fish, but she’s all wrong here. I think I know what Lohman was
trying to do: Probably feeling pigeonholed as the wide-eyed naïf, she was
looking for an NC-17 role where she could ditch the clothes and encircle her
legs around the hips or head of whoever’s in the scene. It’s called Anna Paquin
Syndrome, and it rarely works.
But Bacon and Firth, as always, are
dynamite. Production design, from the gleaming Art Deco of 1950s Miami to the
polyester drabness of the 1970s, is also faultless. The convoluted plot and
jumparounds in time are a little off-putting, though forgivable, as is the
irritating narration and obtrusive music. For some odd reason, it’s easy to get
involved in Truth despite its
numerous flaws.
But I haven’t even told you the most
horrifying part. For the past five days or so I’ve had “The Piña Colada Song”
scampering through my head on a continuous loop. Rupert Holmes, who wrote the
book on which Truth is based, is the
same diabolical mind behind that pop trifle, and once I learned this
semi-interesting bit of trivia, the chorus latched onto my brain like a
bloodthirsty tick. So now I’m passing this factoid on to you, because misery
absolutely adores company.
Would
you like to spend a year in Fiji running a one-screen movie theater?
Watching films you programmed with 300 of your new best friends by tropical
night and relaxing by sunny day sounds good in theory, but John Pierson and his
family actually put it in practice. Documentary filmmaker Steve James (Hoop Dreams) showed up to memorialize
the Pierson family’s last days abroad, and the result is Reel Paradise.
John is an independent film
muckety-muck with an eye for talent (jump-starting the careers of Spike Lee and
Michael Moore), a way with words (writing the definitive indie film primer Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes), and a
highly adaptable family (wife Janet, petulant daughter Georgia, and his sharp
boy Wyatt). While in Fiji John shows free movies every night at the 50-year-old
180 Meridian Cinema, the kids go to school and hang with friends, and Janet
wrestles with her white liberal guilt.
Paradise is as much about the changeable dynamic within the Pierson family as it is
about the culture clash between American movies and island ways. Physical
comedy is popular (Jackass: The Movie was a huge hit), though the more cerebral films aren’t as successful (“How many
people do you think stayed awake during Gangs
of New York?” asks Wyatt). John’s 7:30 start time eats into 7 p.m. Mass,
much to the dismay of the missionaries, while the Pierson home gets robbed and
Georgia’s shortsightedness threatens her best friend’s reputation. Just another
day in Paradise.
Where the Truth Lies (NR), directed
by Atom Egoyan, opens Friday, November 4, at the Little Theatres | Reel
Paradise, directed by Steve James, screens Saturday, November 5, at the
George Eastman House’s Dryden Theatre.
This article appears in Nov 2-8, 2005.
