REVIEWED - WHERE THE TRUTH LIES: This minor but evocative thriller is elevated by impressively sleazy performances from Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth, writes Donald Clarke
THIS tense, seedily enjoyable murder mystery has received some poor reviews for, it seems, the sin of being more frivolous than earlier work by its acclaimed Canadian director, Atom Egoyan. Where the Truth Lies has, it is true, little of the tragic resonance of The Sweet Hereafter and none of the ironic complexity of Exotica. But think of it as an absurdly lavish episode of Columbo and you will most likely have a whale of a time.
In the original book by Rupert Holmes (bizarrely, the same Rupert Holmes who sang The Piña Colada Song), the 1950s double act around whom the action revolves was very explicitly modelled on Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. Egoyan has turned Vince Collins, the saner of the two, into a dry English entertainer played, with undercurrents of Peter Lawford and Cary Grant, by an impressively tormented Colin Firth. Lanny Morris, the irrepressible clown, has become less manic and more like Kevin Bacon, who, usefully, rarely comes across on screen as being entirely trustworthy.
The movie focuses on Vince and Lanny's interactions with two young women, one a journalist, the other hoping to be so, a decade and a half apart. In 1957 the boys are preparing for their annual polio telecast when a pretty young chambermaid (Rachel Blanchard) asks to interview them for her college paper. Later she is found dead in a hotel bathtub a thousand miles away.
In 1972 a writer for an upmarket magazine (Alison Lohman) is commissioned to write a profile of Vince. Before she arrives at his mansion she bumps into Lanny and they have a brief fling. The tensions caused by that encounter complicate her attempts to discover what happened to the murdered girl.
There are, at times, suggestions that Egoyan may be too much of a cinematic highbrow to tailor his story to genre templates - the writers of Columbo would certainly have trimmed away the film's pretentious nods towards Alice in Wonderland. And the uncharismatic female leads are somewhat overpowered by Firth and Bacon.
But, as James Ellroy has repeatedly demonstrated, there is something endlessly fascinating about the druggy, sexy half-world visited, cardigans off, by so many apparently clean-cut 1950s performers.
Featuring a sinister score by Mychael Danna and evocative Vaseline-fuzzy photography by Paul Sarossy, Egoyan's enjoyable entertainment proves a welcome addition to the cinema of the dark underbelly.
