Where The Truth Lies

Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan is congenitally incapable of making a trashy movie. Even when dealing with potentially scuzzy scenarios, like the voyeuristic, strip club drama Exotica, his staging is invariably elegant and his scripts thoughtful and restrained. Everything he does seems controlled by an intelligence at once sophisticated and deeply suspicious of excess.

But excess is exactly what Where The Truth Lies needs. The story about the shadowy breakup of a popular Fifties vaudeville act heaves with sleaze and audiences will probably be mystified by the film's stilted tone. Egoyan's innate classiness, so essential to his last movie, Ararat, is a liability here. Material this pulpy needs a David Lynch, or The Last Seduction's John Dahl; in other words, it needs a director with a gift for vulgarity and a taste for prurience.

Based on Rupert Holmes' 2003 novel, Where The Truth Lies takes place in the pre-Watergate Seventies, as a young reporter named Karen O'Connor (Alison Lohman) investigates the dissolution, 15 years previously, of song-and-dance act, Vince Collins (Colin Firth) and Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon). In flashbacks, we see the duo - thinly disguised stand-ins for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis - perform in upscale clubs, trading wisecracks and double entendres. The easy intimacy of their professional life has eroded all private boundaries and everything is communal: hotel rooms, drugs, even the giggling groupies Lanny culls from each night's audience.

As Lanny and Vince prepare for a Labour Day telethon, a beautiful female corpse is discovered in their hotel suite. Under a cloud of suspicion and scandal, the men end their partnership and disappear from public life. Now Karen, brandishing a book deal and a cherished childhood memory of that very same telethon, is poking around in the past with bribery (of the down-on-his-luck Vince) and blackmail (of the amoral Lanny). Sucked into their showbiz world, Karen is transformed into a tawdry Alice lost in a rabbit-hole of celebrity vices - a threadbare motif Egoyan (who also wrote the screenplay) hammers home in an excruciating pageant scene, with kids in bunny ears and a young girl belting out White Rabbit. Never has this director been so obvious.

Poised uneasily between cheesy murder mystery and serious Hollywood satire, Where The Truth Lies is an adult noir, crumbling under the burden of an inept femme fatale. Hopelessly out of her depth, Lohman navigates drugs, blackmail and an irrelevant three-way with the sensitivity of a shark and an expression of spectacular vacuousness. We're supposed to care what happens to Karen, but she's so unpleasant it's difficult to shake the feeling that she - and every other woman in the film, including the dead one - is getting exactly what she deserves.

Bacon once again delivers (as in last year's The Woodsman) beyond the film's capacity to support him. Alternately popping bennies and young girls, he plays the tortured Lanny as a funny man whose jokes have long since curdled in boredom and self-loathing and whose restless appetites conceal an explosive temper. It's a very physical performance and Bacon, all knees and elbows and manic energy, is mesmerising. As Lanny writes his own book and we're never sure how much is true and how much his egomaniacal imagination, we can see the film Egoyan should have made. In Lanny, all the director's familiar concerns - truth vs fabrication, past vs present, representation vs. actuality - are distilled, buffed to a high gloss by the corruptions of celebrity.

Where The Truth Lies is fatally more concerned with Karen's odyssey than Lanny's and the film goes limp whenever he's off screen. Perhaps Egoyan's coolly distant temperament is simply ill suited to a project that demands he get his hands dirty.

"Having to be a nice guy is the toughest thing in the world if you're not," observes Lanny in a rare moment of insight. Sadly, for Egoyan, the reverse also holds true.