The Invention of Lying (2009)

The Invention of Lying arrives from 2009, which in the current taxonomy makes it a relic of a gentler epoch. Ricky Gervais plays Mark Bellison, a screenwriter in an alternate reality where no human has ever uttered a falsehood, a condition that produces a world of brutal candor and mediocre historical films about the fourteenth century. When Mark discovers he can lie, he uses the trick for petty gain, then for comfort, then for something resembling scripture. The film's targets are religion, celebrity, and the casual cruelty of a species that never learned tact. None of those targets belong to the contemporary social justice register, and the picture shows no interest in acquiring one.

The romance rests on Anna McDoogles, played by Jennifer Garner, who rejects Mark on explicitly genetic grounds. She wants a husband whose appearance will produce attractive children, and she says so, plainly, more than once. A more recent film might convert this material into a treatise on beauty standards and self-acceptance. This one does not. It treats the premise as a romantic obstacle and resolves it with sincerity. The supporting cast is a wall of familiar white comedians, and race never surfaces as a subject. Nor do queerness, environmental anxiety, class resentment, or neurological difference. The film has other things on its mind.

Where it does preach, it preaches about the afterlife. Mark's tearful invention of a Man in the Sky, first offered to his dying mother and later delivered to the world as ten commandments, plays as a sermon with a laugh track. The sequence carries a real charge, and it is the only passage in the picture that lectures anyone about anything. The object of that lecture is God, not society. We are left with a comedy about mendacity that is itself remarkably innocent of the modern catechism.