Pants on Fire! The Inspired Invention of Lying

Ricky Gervais must know he’s cute. Cute like the grinning kid in the back row of a sixth-grade classroom, smiling at the teacher as he mutters a rude observation about how she looks from behind. He’s cartoon-animal round and ingratiatingly impish. Yet Gervais, in films and on TV, keeps harping on his diminutive stature and lack of a heroic jawline. He might almost be begging for the viewer to reply, “No, you’re not at all tremendously unattractive. The word for you, Ricky, would be cute.”

In his funny, agreeable, airily subversive parable The Invention of Lying, on which he shared writing and directing chores with Matthew Robinson, Gervais is at it again. His character, Mark Bellison, describes himself as a “chubby little loser.” Mind you, that’s what everyone else calls him too; for the movie posits a world in which people are compelled to speak the truth, however harsh it sounds, because they haven’t recognized either the social utility of telling folks what they want to hear or the potential for career advancement–not to mention bank-robbing–in bending the facts. So Mark’s colleagues at the film studio where he’s a writer feel obliged to inform him that he’s about to be fired. And when he finally snags a date with his adored co-worker Anna (Jennifer Garner), she greets him by saying, “Hi. You’re early. I was just masturbating.”

In the film’s solid three-act structure, Act 1 gets good mileage from the bitter-truth premise. In this world, a retirement home is called “A Sad Place for Hopeless Old People”; a motel is “A Cheap Place to Have Intercourse with a Near Stranger.” There’s even truth in advertising, as indicated by the slogans for Coke (“It’s very famous”) and Pepsi (“When they don’t have Coke”).

Mark, of course, must somehow invent lying–in Act II–which in the land of blind truth tellers makes him king. He takes his friend Greg (Louis C.K.) to a casino, moves the chips on the roulette table after the ball has landed and pockets a bundle. Then, to soothe his dying mother (Fionnula Flanagan), he concocts his biggest whopper yet: Heaven. Word gets around about this great news, life after death, and in a fairly bold Act III Mark reveals to his swelling flock of acolytes the truth, or the inspired lie, of the “big man who lives in the sky.”

Lying: it’s the fundament of all fiction–and what comedians, those unbeautiful little people, do to get attention. This film also says it’s the root of all religions, a placebo for troubled minds. But the oily sadist Gervais played on The Office is not the movie Ricky (seen here and in last year’s Ghost Town), who’d rather have a hug than a slap in the face. Mark, getting in deeper before he has to make a public declaration of his sins, may deserve both, but ultimately he could be the hero of a Frank Capra fable, if Capra had been an atheist. The Invention of Lying is likely to leave people, believers or not, with a smile. You’re pretty cute, Ricky, they’ll say. And so is your movie.