Week of October 6, 2005, Issue #520
FILM
Sex, lies and coincidence
By JOSEF BRAUN
Based on the novel by writer/musician Rupert Holmes (most famous for authoring
“Escape (The Piña Colada Song)”), Where the Truth Lies is
a slippery number about the sordid side of show business, set in an era when
the media was still working up to its full-blown obsession with sniffing out
every bit of celebrity’s dirty laundry. Karen O’Connor (Alison Lohman)
is an upwardly mobile young journalist searching for undisclosed facts behind
the beautiful blonde corpse that precipitated the early retirement of Karen’s
childhood heroes, the ever-tuxedoed Martin and Lewis-like duo of sleaze-clown
Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon) and straight man Vincent Collins (Colin Firth). Karen’s
task is complicated, as her predisposition toward Vince and Lanny is gradually
tainted by sneak-peeks at Lanny’s tawdry memoir-in-progress, but more
so by her duplicitous, intimate involvement in the lives of both men, now lonely
and on the other side of middle age.
Though not as unmanageably tangled as Ararat, Where the Truth Lies is characteristic
of director Atom Egoyan’s work, with its teasing layers of identity and
deception and carefully mapped-out interconnections of character. It’s
also characteristic of Egoyan’s interest in how people inadvertently reveal
and sabotage themselves through misdirected sexual desire, and how they cope
with issues of sexual responsibility. In this case, the sexual content (unfairly)
slapped Egoyan with an NC-17 rating in the U.S., a sentence that severely hinders
a wide release, which is all the more frustrating since Where the Truth Lies,
with its recognizable stars, intrigue and diffused neo-noir sheen, stands a
solid chance at reaching a broader audience.
Burnt out on questions of the MPAA rating that he fielded during the film’s
North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, Egoyan resolutely banned
the topic of how many thrusts is too many at the start of our conversation.
We focused instead on how the film fits into Egoyan’s oeuvre, the challenges
it brought and the new paths it allowed him to follow.
Vue Weekly: What initially drew you to Rupert Holmes’s novel?
Atom Egoyan: I loved this idea of characters determined by circumstances beyond
their control, characters who believe they can govern their fate through these
texts they’re writing. I’m always interested in characters pretending
to be someone else. Besides that, I think we’re all influenced by the
American entertainment machine, and it was an opportunity to reflect on that
and examine the way these things are constructed, while still making it very
entertaining and finding a wider audience.
VW: Yet you had reservations about aspects of Holmes’s narrative and made
some significant changes.
AE: The main one being that Karen was a participant on their telethon as a child
and shared this history with them, that those three days were mythological to
her and changed her life. So by extension, while compiling this information
as a journalist, she has her own personal mission to somehow clear her heroes
of any wrongdoing.
VW: This alteration seems consistent with a trend in your films toward deliberately
tying together characters that might have remained disparate entities. Is the
emphasis on interconnectedness reflective of a personal belief in coincidence
or destiny, or is it simply a device to make things more unified?
.
AE: I’m fascinated by how we construct community, by shared values, tolerances
and projections and how do we sustain a fantasy about who we really are, how
that’s reconciled with the nature of human frailty. These are stirring
issues for me. They’re at the root of what I find dramatic. So a lot of
my films do have this structure where people who don’t even know they’re
connected find themselves connected, and it’s expected that moments of
connection are going to have meaning. One of the most heartbreaking moments
in the film is when Karen reveals to her heroes that she was the girl on that
telethon and is met with emotional indifference. This especially happens in
our relationship with celebrity: we imagine a relationship that cannot really
exist. I remember going to see Robert Plant as a kid and, at one point, feeling
certain he was looking right at me. I was completely overwhelmed. It was years
later when I was on a stage under blinding lights that I realized you couldn’t
see anyone in the audience at all.
VW: But this is a separate issue from interconnectedness and coincidence in
your films.
AE: Well, I think coincidence as a dramatic construction exists as an affirmation
that we’re connected in ways we never anticipate. What’s surprising
to me is this very strange zone where coincidence is either acceptable to a
viewer or not. Maybe it’s that Jungian idea of synchronicity, but sometimes
things really do unfold in real life in ways that seem choreographed, so that
point at which things become improbable has always been a little suspect to
me.
VW: Where the Truth Lies enjoyed your biggest budget to date. Did that budget
dramatically alter your approach?
AE: Oh yeah. I could paint tableaus that I’d never be able to do otherwise,
these period scenes and extravagant camera gestures with these cranes and crowds,
these colours, that whole rhythm—it’s something you need money to
do. It was fun to take my team and go to this place where we’re reconstructing
Hollywood. Remember, a lot of this is Lanny’s version of history, and
if he was filming this he wouldn’t hire Atom Egoyan. He’d want Vincent
Minnelli or somebody. So it was great to slip into that cinematic persona.
VW: Do you feel comfortable with the idea of making a prestige picture? Is that
a direction you can move toward and still find creative satisfaction?
AE: The barrier will always be structure. I get impatient with linear structure.
I have a certain rhythm when I’m writing, a certain way of conceiving
something. There will always be people who find my films exquisitely complex
and other people who find it convoluted. But that’s what I do, what I
get excited by. Hopefully in this film, it’s complex but also seductive.
Hopefully people will be so seduced that the complications become fun as well
as challenging. V
Where the Truth Lies
Written and directed by Atom Egoyan • Starring Kevin Bacon, Colin
Firth and Alison Lohman • Opens Fri, Oct 7