According to Colwell

Ricky Gervais’s The Invention of Lying is a movie based on a brilliant central idea with mixed results. In a world otherwise like our own, no one has the capacity to lie or even to conceive of the concept of lying. Since all fiction is a lie, actors in this world simply narrate historical events. When Mark (Gervais) tells a friend that “he said something that wasn’t” he is met with a blank stare of incomprehension. While Mark tries to seduce the unwilling Anna (Jennifer Garner), he believes that he can use his unique power to make people happier. He tells a depressed man that things will get better for him. The man of course believes him, and so is instantly happier. Or at least hopeful, which is a big improvement. And then his biggest lie gets him into a spot of bother: faced with his dying mother’s terror at an eternity of emptiness, he concocts the ultimate lie. Religion.

Mark tells his mother that she will go to a wonderful place and be reunited with everyone she ever loved. Having been overheard by the doctor, Mark becomes an instant celebrity as the man who “has no information about what happens after you die.” Not having had a lifetime to master the art of deceit, however, Mark is not particularly good at weaving lies. One day he tells Anna a story, meant to impress her, about the time he saved a baby from a burning building and was attacked by a bear after jumping from the second floor into enough jam to break his fall. But the weakness of his lies is irrelevant for a world that has no choice but to believe them.

While the idea of exploring the value of lying to individual happiness and societal well-being is fascinating and clever, the execution of it in this movie had a couple of problems. The most serious, for me, is the struggling romance between Mark and Anna. Anna likes everything about Mark except the likelihood that their children would be overweight with stubby noses. Except for some physical appeal, it is not at all clear what Mark sees in Anna, who is dreadfully shallow. Unless, as the movie indicates, her focus on genetics is somehow a natural part of this lie-free world. But why would it be? And other couples are seen in the movie who are in love, or are fighting, or are otherwise having normal relationships that are not built around their genetic compatibility.

A deeper problem, though one that presumably must be accepted along with the movie’s premise, is that people can “say something that isn’t” without lying. My students do it on their exams, on average, about 30 per cent of the time. They are certainly not lying when they say that the solar system is 4 million years old, or that the Earth is the largest planet, they are simply mistaken. And in making a mistake, they “say something that isn’t.” So the inhabitants of Gervais’s world should be very well acquainted with the idea of people saying things that turn out not to be true. Somebody should have the idea that, perhaps, all that new information about what happens after we die might be an honest mistake.

[I saw this in June, and forgot to finish writing the review. It may be too little, too late, but at least now seeing the movie is chronicled.]

“AWAY TO PHOENIX” appears in bold white letters on a black background 20 minutes into the movie Away We Go as Burt and Verona embark on their cross-country voyage to find a new place to live. While the titles, and the cast of crackpot friends and acquaintances that Burt and Verona visit, are bold, the couple at the center of this movie are generally quiet, polite, and soft-spoken. Burt, the more lively of the two, shouts at his wife’s pregnant belly to check the effect on its heart rate. I had more interest in some of their friends than in Burt and Verona themselves. It was hard to get to know the couple and what they were looking for in life. Until, at the end of the movie, they find it.

Nick Hornby, whose novels (About a Boy, High Fidelity, Fever Pitch (actually a memoir of sorts)) deal with men struggling to reconcile their desire to remain living the life of a teenager with the realities of life as an adult, wrote the screenplay of An Education, about a teenage girl struggling to reconcile her vision of life as an adult with the painful realities. The movie is based on a memoir by Lynn Barber who is 16-year-old Jenny in the movie, played beautifully by Carey Mulligan. Jenny is the star student at her private school in a London suburb in 1960 with her sights set on going to Oxford. Or at least her parents have their sights set on her going to Oxford. When a dashing 30-something named David (Peter Sarsgaard) shows up in a sporty car to offer Jenny a ride home in the rain, her poor geeky teenage suitor stands no chance.

It is hard to decide what aspect of the movie is most creepy: the romantic relationship that develops between Jenny and a man twice her age or the tacit approval of this relationship by society as a whole and Jenny’s parents in particular. Her father, played by Alfred Molina, is so concerned about her future financial stability, that for him the prospect of her dropping out of school is more than compensated for by a connection to a wealthy sophisticate. For her part, Jenny is seduced not just by David’s charms, but by the alternative to grinding away at the books for no obvious reason. The movie fails to articulate a case for Jenny to go to school. Her teacher and the headmistress of her school can only point to their own careers, both portrayed as dismal, as the rewards for a woman going to Oxford University. Her English teacher, a young woman who recognizes Jenny’s potential, is worn down by the apathy of her other students. She is made to seem like a lonely bookworm with her hair tightly pulled back and a pale complexion. It is a bit too simplistic a way to make the glamorous life of jazz clubs and weekends in the countryside offered by David the obvious choice over the more responsible - and more rewarding - educational path. Of course, the education of the title refers not to her book learning, but to Jenny’s education on the ways of greedy and less-than-honest men.