The Invention of Lying

In a world where everyone tells the truth, Mark (Ricky Gervais) suddenly realizes he is able to lie, and everyone takes his words as the truth since no one has experienced lying before. The film does not explain how or why this happened to Mark, nor why he seems to understand the concept of lying. Now finally Mark can go on a date with the shallow Anna (Jennifer Garner) by lying about who he is, inflating his status in her eyes. She usually is bored with him but doesn't consider him marriage material due to his unattractiveness. Once Mark finds that he can lie, he does so thinking that it makes his and others' lives happier, but later learns it is a shallow existence with no meaning, and even worse than before.

Mark digs himself deeper in his hole, hoping to help others become better people, but everyone mistakenly believes they can be bad people on Earth since he has previously told them heaven is guaranteed.

Anna begins to question if a storybook life with the handsome Brad (Rob Lowe) is the one she wants, or she wants true love with Mark.


Unfortunately this was a one-joke movie with a poorly paired main couple. Just because no one could lie, it meant they could carte blanche insult everyone with the truth for humor, which ended up being mean rather than funny and relatable to me. Garner was badly cast, she's basically a bimbo here that throws over the jock for the nerd because it was just what the story required and not that the Mark character offers her real love nor is a model character. Anna too remains a pretty shallowly written character, not very defined so other than her physical attractiveness we don't get why Mark would want her as a partner. In addition, everyone's belief of Mark's crazy lies was not convincing at all because no one questioned them.

For some reason the staging of the movie seemed to give me a feel as if this was taking place in a Heaven kind of place, it felt sterile and unreal.

Gervais was affable but not very strong in the role, it was a boring representation. I find that he is pretty weak and not a good choice as a romantic comedy lead and that he should probably stick to his strength of being acerbic like he was in The Office tv series and other projects. Maybe he bit off more than he could chew, as he also co-directed and co-wrote this project.  He did have some good dramatic moments with Fionnula Flanagan who plays Mark's mother, and Louis CK had a good supporting role as Mark's friend.  Other usually reliably comic actors such as Jeffrey Tambor and Tina Fey were unable to help bring the funny.