What is most disappointing about ""The Invention of Lying,"" the latest comedy by Ricky Gervais, creator of ""The Office"" and ""Extras,"" is that it comes so close to being as brilliant as its premise. Gervais' protagonist, Mark Bellison, lives in a world where people never developed the ability to lie. The result is a society without mistrust, without fiction and without that which becomes the focal point of the plot: religion. The idea that religion cannot exist in an exclusively truthful world is both subversive and fascinating, but unfortunately the concept is never fully fleshed out.
This is not to say that the film is not funny. From the spin-less advertisements (""Pepsi: For When They Don't Have Coke"") to the frank first-date discourse between Mark and his way-out-of-his-league counterpart, Anna (an appropriately wide-eyed Jennifer Garner) to the fantastic cameos by the likes of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Edward Norton, the first half hour or so of the film is in peak Gervaisian comedic form.
Then Mark discovers how to tell, as he would say, ""what isn't."" He learns to fabricate and deceive and use this newfound power for his own gain. While the plot could have easily taken an ""every dog has his day"" turn, it doesn't. True, Mark dabbles in exploiting his society's trustful nature for money, power and sex, but he soon learns to use the ability to lie for good. However, sometime between inventing the concept of lying and comforting his mother on her deathbed, he invents religion as well, and the masses cannot get enough of it.
Mark, with tablets constructed of Pizza Hut boxes sporting the new 10 commandments, becomes a modern-day Jesus for a world that never had a biblical one. The religion he creates, complete with a ""big man in the sky"" and an afterlife in which everybody gets a mansion, begins to bring out the best and worst in his society, much as it does in our own.
Through the contrast of the purely Darwinian world from the beginning of the film and the newly fervent society shown later on, Gervais creates a view of religion that can be mistaken as being simply atheistic. However, it is much more complex than that. He presents religion as a necessary deceit that has the power to protect people from the harshness of reality, but as a deceit nonetheless.
As radical as this is for a mainstream comedy, the philosophy of it all is muddled by the pitfalls of romantic comedy. Yes, despite all of this wonderfully conceived religious allegory, ""The Invention of Lying"" is a rom-com, and not a very good one at that. In the end, the whole point of Mark Bellison's philosophical adventures is to get a girl who is, as is repeated many, many times throughout the film, way out of his league. While Gervais, Garner and even Gervais's archnemsis, former brat-pack hunksicle Rob Lowe, give great comedic performances, the whole love-triangle subplot bogs down what should be a truly great film.
In this world, where Ricky Gervais can pretty much do no wrong, he makes one terrible mistake with ""The Invention of Lying."" He presents original, subversive ideas and then allows them to be eclipsed by mainstream rom-com clichés in to appeal to a wider audience. He fails to take his religious satire all the way, and the result is a comedy that is indeed funny, but, truthfully, is neither here nor there.
Grade: B
