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Anna McDoogles (Jennifer Garner) decides she’d rather date hunky Brad Kessler (Rob Lowe) than dumpy Mark Bellison (Ricky Gervais) in the comic fantasy “The Invention of Lying.” |
“The Invention of Lying” tells such an imaginative, witty story with such likable main characters that you hardly notice the subversive idea festering at the core of its plot, that religion is one big, fat lie created to make frightened people feel better about their dull, shallow existences.
The movie doesn’t exactly hammer this point home. It’s almost an afterthought, a throwaway assertion in a daring, hilarious, fantastic premise that imagines a ruthlessly honest world where people cannot tell lies, or pass on any sort of misleading information.
Ricky Gervais – who codirects the comedy with first-time director/writer Matthew Robinson – brings his veddy dry British sense of humor to play Mark Bellison, a pudgy, nondescript man who writes boring screenplays for a company called Lecture Films.
Because no one tells untruths, fiction doesn’t exist. The “movies” consist of narrators reading histories, or as the Lecture Films motto says, “We Film Someone Telling You About Things That Happened.” (Read more…)