Title: The Invention Of Lying
Year: 2009
Genre: Comedy, Fantasy, Romance
Director: Ricky Gervais, Matthew Robinson
Writer: Ricky Gervais, Matthew Robinson
Runtime: 100min
Cast: Ricky Gervais, Jennifer Garner, Jonah Hill, Louis C. K., Jeffrey Tambor, Rob Lowe, Tina Fey
Produc.: Warner Bros. Pictures, Radar Pictures, Media Rights Capital, Lin Pictures, Lynda Obst Productions, Wintergreen Productions
Budget: $18,5 million approx.
The Invention of Lying takes us into an alternate reality in the XXI century, were human beings cannot lie, but not because they consider that lying is bad, but directly because this concept has not yet been invented.
In this world where absolutely everyone tells the truth all the time, we have Mark Bellison, a not very attractive guy, not very successful either, and who is about to become unemployed. The film begins when Mark meets Anna McDoogle (Jennifer Garner), girl he´s going to have a date with. As soon as they see face to face, Anna does not think it twice when saying exactly what goes through her mind. Anna goes straight to the point, saying that she doesn´t find him attractive and that he can be already forgetting the idea of having sex. And, truth after truth, it's the way that such a particular night goes by, although not necessarily an uncomfortable one, as the absolute truth, expressed at all times, is something they are already used to.
In this way, and finished the event, we also get to know Mark's work environment, and so each of the truths that his colleagues do not hesitate to say aloud. From Shelley (Tina Fey), Mark´s secretary, who has no qualms for endlessly repeating him that now he is almost certainly going to be fired, or how much she dislikes him. Soon after we also know Brad Kessler (Rob Lowe), its main competitor writer, who in the course of a few minutes will tell him how much he too dislikes him, he gets him to know how happy he is now that they´re going to let him go, as well as how threatened he has always felt next to him. Following these presentations, then Mark is definitely fired by his boss Anthony (Jeffrey Tambor).
Once put to one side the office environment, we now know some other details of his private life, as his mother Martha (Fionnula Flanagan), admitted to a geriatric terminally ill, or that Mark resides, at least temporarily, in an apartment he rents. To that, when the tenant appears asking the $800 monthly payment, Mark has to manage to evade and postpone the agreement.
The truth is that in a few minutes of film the screenplay written by Gervais and Robinson is effective in its aim to keep one imbued with the story, this due to the indisputable fact that one cannot help but wonder how is life in a world which has not known a single lie.
Everything will eventually change when Mark has to resort to the bank for rent money. The problem here is that Mark only has $300 in his account, an amount that is not enough to prevent their eviction. Then Mark comes to the receiver, but before he can say anything the girl tells him that the system has fallen and they have no way of processing data in the computers. However, this is where Gervais and Robinson must have agreed on when they wrote the script, as both have concur that certain freedoms were to be taken narratively, because as we all know, never a bank would extend money to a client without checking it first on the computers. The clerk chooses to ask Mark to tell her how much money he wants anyway, not knowing if her client has that amount. And here is when it happens what will change the course of history. Mark must ask for his meager $300, but deep in, his head is filled with the number 800 and that's the amount he requests. Having the number been said already aloud, it happens the unexpected and the system returns to get going, something that worries Mark, because he said something he should not, said a "lie." Although he is unfamiliar to that word. Then the young lady looks on the computer, where it reads $300, but if Mark has said $800 (and since we are in a world where lying does not exist), therefore there must have been a glitch. Conclusion: she must extend that $800 to the client.
When Mark comes out victorious from the bank we see in his face the expression of an individual who seems to have discovered gunpowder, and it is in fact, no wonder. Mark has just done something no other human being on earth has ever done before and that also opens him a world of new possibilities, thanks to the lie. Or rather, and given the absence of a name for this new concept, thanks to "saying something that is not."
Mark will begin to "say things that are not" in order to try people and learn how extensive the repertoire of options would open, for saying "that thing that one mustn´t". What then happens is that people, completely unaware of this concept, ends up believing what Mark tells, and in along the film are some fun examples.
But the flick has used the trigger moment of the withdrawal of money for this to ramify into two new key situations. On the one hand, once Mark learns to lie he manages to raise large amounts of cash in various ways, which means to no longer being a loser, and Anna, the girl from the date, and who wanted to partner as a couple with someone handsome and wealthy, maybe could now see him differently, at least partially. So Mark calls her again, and persevering he gets a second date. Needless to say that, since The Invention of Lying is an original movie, arguably speaking, but also of those who seek (and it´s not wrong at all) the typical happy ending, to make all the female audience happy one must understand how clearly the future will be between Mark and Anna.
And the other topic that is mention in this movie and that will be for the taste of many and to the dismay of many others, is religion. I don´t actually know, for sure, if any of the writers/directors of this movie is atheist or agnostic, but whatever their religious persuasion might be, here they strongly criticize the church. They do it in a scene in which Mark's mother about to croak is shown terrified at the thought of dying, and arguing that this is going to be her end. Through tears and suffering for his mother, Mark has an idea. To lie and make her believe in the existence of life after death, where one expects to be living in heaven and so on. The film plays a lot with the idea of God, taking it for mockery, and incorporating concepts, perhaps even absurd, that, to my knowledge have not become part of any religion so far, as the possibility that each decease one may have a castle in paradise itself.
On this point, one itself, believer or not, could be offended or mature enough to laugh at the matter and said that it is just a movie. But that will depend on each person.
My rating: 7/10
My rating: 7/10
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario