Review of "Where the Truth Lies" Starring Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth

After viewing the documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated, about the MPAA rating system, I was particularly interested in one film that had inexplicably drawn an NC-17 rating. According to director Atom Egoyan, his film Where the Truth Lies suffered significantly in terms of distribution because of the rating, despite the fact that Where the Truth Lies is a story-based film that happens to have a couple scenes involving homoeroticism. So of course I had to get access to the film, because it sounded too good to be true: a movie with powerhouse actors, a daring director, and sexually graphic scenes. To boot, I would be one of the few to have seen this MPAA-suppressed gem.

In all honesty, my expectations were met, but not in the way I expected. My DVD of Where the Truth Lies carries an R rating, so evidently it's not the director's cut. But mostly this movie has a central focus on the story and is not remotely pornographic. All skin shown, which isn't that excessive or even that much, was central to the development of the characters and setting (the party-hard world of Show Business when people still used the term). Therefore this is a movie that shows the utter unreliability (and homophobia) of the MPAA ratings system, but which is a good film in its own right.

The story has two settings, the first in the late 1950s, when comedy duo Lanny Morris (Keving Bacon) and Vince Collins (Colin Firth) somehow find themselves involved in a murder involving drugs, alcohol, the Mob, and the hotel maid. The second setting is in the 1970s, when young journalist Karen O'Connor (Alison Lohman) earns a publishing contract to get to the bottom of the case, and finds herself, like the maid years before, caught between the two show business icons. The film is based on the Rupert Holmes novel of the same name.

Much is appealing about the cast, direction, sets, and cinematography of Where the Truth Lies. The two young actresses in the film, Lohman and Rachel Blanchard, are gorgeous and their sumptuous beauty is caught by Egoyan's camera. Bacon and Firth drive the story forward, which transitions from a movie involving impressive 1950s and 1970s set pieces to a murder-mystery thriller. Atom Egoyan, who wrote the script adaptation of the novel, has a special eye for which image to capture to signal the mood of the scene.

A good movie and not a great one, Where the Truth Lies has a rating just over six out of ten on Internet Movie Database, but drew two thumbs up from Ebert and Roeper. The editing gets a little slow in the middle third of the story, and the concluding one-third of the movie feels too much like the board game Clue. The final sequence, which tries to tie up the loose ends of the story, struck me as slightly moralistic, which is odd for a movie originally rated NC-17!

However, if you're interested in the MPAA ratings system at all, this is an intriguing movie to check out. The not-even-close-to-excessive homoeroticism in the two short sex scenes are at once central (for building character) and peripheral (as "graphic sex scenes") to the story. Where the Truth Lies is a solid period-piece whodunit movie which probably would have been more easily forgotten had it not drawn Hollywood's strongest rating.

Sources

"Where the Truth Lies." Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0373450/