Where the Truth Lies
(Sony Region 1 NTSC DVD)
(1998)
review by Thera Belle

Just the other day I was talking to someone and he said that I don't have a type A personality.  He said I have a type G personality...whatever that means.  I told him I have a type AB positive personality.  HAHA, ain't I clever?  As I am hard to pin down and dissect, so is a film like Where The Truth Lies.

When it was released I remember seeing some buzz for it.  You know the annoying stuff:  Entertainment Tonight and Mary Hart with her botoxed befuddlement about what she's cluelessly reading and maybe a few trailers on television between The Gilmore Girl's and whatever comes after that.  It didn't get the blockbuster treatment and so it passed beyond the eyes of man rather quickly until it was released on DVD.  I picked my copy up, the Unrated Theatrical Edition, at Ingles, a grocery store.  They resale previously viewed films at half the price just a few weeks after they're released to the public.  Three days later I popped it into the player and sat back to watch.

It's a mystery, it's an erotic thriller, it's a homage to the tail end of
the golden era of Hollywood, it's a showcase for Colin Firth, it's Kevin Bacon doing another film for which he will be largely ignored until some British newspaper interviews him about always working and being largely ignored, and it is Alison Lohman's hard bitten reporter with a voice like Marilyn Monroe and the tenacity of Edward R. Murrow.  It's Film Noir.

Firth and Bacon play a singing, dancing, comedy team, in the 1950's, much like Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.  On stage and off they are very close, so close that they share not only their drug addictions but their sex addictions as well.  Of the two Bacon is the more unsavory while Firth shows a protective violent streak that makes one question just how much he loves his partner.

The story involves the weekend of a telethon benefiting victims of polio, which the Lohman character was a survivor of and appears on their televised show, requiring some very strange but largely effective CGI as her character is only ten or so at the time.  Must be seen to be believed.  On that weekend in Miami Firth and Bacon share the charms of a college student who comes to their hotel suite to interview them.  Conveniently drugged and pliant, the student is witness to an incident revealed much later in the
film for which she is murdered.  There is no question she was murdered but the Hollywood machine of the time manipulates the facts because this team of entertainers are high dollar and must be protected.

Fast forward, fast back, get whiplash from the segments fifteen years later when Lohman, reporter, is doing a book about Bacon, now mogul and still entertainer and money maker in Hollywood, focusing on said weekend.  Conveniently and accidentally she is drawn into his world by a chance encounter on a plane flying from L.A. to N.Y.  They become briefly involved, more of Bacon's character is revealed than is palatable to her, and her carefully laid plans spiral out of control.  Moral of that part of the story is:  Never get too close to your subject.

Lohman's encounters with Firth are just downright creepy.  He comes across like the uncle your parents tell you not to be alone with.  Charming but corrupt and just waiting to corrupt the innocent.  He hides a guilty secret and Lohman, in her devotion to a story that will clear Bacon (her fingers are crossed) ignores her best instincts and goes off to his Hollywood Hills enclave and gets caught in the tangled web of the story she's trying to unravel and almost falls under the weight of these secrets and lies.

Where The Truth Lies never satisfies the questions it raises.  Not
completely.  Though the murderer is revealed I was never sure if it was the Truth or just more Lies.  In that way I'm left to ponder it weeks after viewing it.  Most films I see I quickly forget, just like most books I read.

This sticks with me.  That is a good thing.