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List Price: $14.94 | | Label: THINKFilm
Salesrank: 16174
Released: February 28, 2006 |
| Our Price: $4.78 |
| Used Price: $1.99 |
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MPAA Rating: Unrated
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
Starring Kevin Bacon (Beauty Shop, Mystic River), Colin Firth (Love Actually, Bridget Jones's Diary) and Alison Lohman (Big Fish, Matchstick Men), Where the Truth Lies is a suspenseful mystery from acclaimed director Atom Egoyan. In the '50s, Vince Collins (Firth) and Lanny Morris (Bacon) are the hottest showbiz duo in America. The combination of Lanny's brash American style and Vince's biting British wit is irresistible, especially to beautiful women. When a beautiful young woman, Maureen (Rachel Blanchard) is found dead in the bathtub of the duo's suite, their glittery world begins to crumble. They have rock solid alibis and are exonerated of any criminal wrongdoing; however, the scandal causes the once inseparable pair to part company. Fifteen years later, Karen O'Connor (Lohman), a young and ambitious journalist, is determined to uncover the secrets of the two men who, coincidentally, touched her life when she was a child. She persuades a publisher to offer a guarded Vince Collins one million dollars to collaborate with her on writing the untold story of his life with Lanny Morris. There is one condition: the truth must be told about the scandal that destroyed the duo. What really happened the night Maureen died? As Karen continues to search for many different truths-the truth about Vince and Lanny, the truth about Maureen's death, and even suppressed truths about herself- she becomes embroiled in a tense and bewildering game of cat-and-mouse.
Description of Where the Truth Lies (Unrated Theatrical Edition):
Director Atom Egoyan's 2005 film Where the Truth Lies is laden with nudity, sex, violence, lies, blackmail, betrayal… and really, what more could you want? Other than some genuine tension, a more compelling story, and better acting, that is. In adapting Rupert Holmes' novel, the Cairo-born Egoyan (Ararat, Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter) has taken on a murder mystery with film noir elements that will leave many viewers wondering exactly "whodunit" until the final few scenes; and while that's surely a good thing, the ride itself simply isn't all that scintillating. Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth star as a (Dean) Martin & (Jerry) Lewis-style team whose principal talents seem to consist mainly of pill-popping, soulless sex with a stream of nubile young women, and hosting an annual polio telethon. Fifteen years after their '50s heyday, journalist Karen O'Connor (Alison Lohman), who appeared on the telethon as a child, seeks out the pair to determine why they split up and, not coincidentally, what really happened to the dead girl with whom they had dallied the night before. Bacon is reasonably unctuous as the leering Lanny Morris; but Firth is uninspired as the more elusive Vince Collins, and although Lohman is game, she sometimes seems out of her depth in a role that calls for her to both seduce and be seduced, to manipulate and be manipulated. Egoyan, who also wrote the screenplay, has an eye for odd little details (much is made of Pan Am's first class dinner service, for instance) and an ear for great music (the soundtrack includes tunes by Charles Mingus, Louis Prima, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and Funkadelic) and good dialogue ("Having to be a nice guy is the toughest job in the world when you're not"). But the film is curiously tepid; the sex is unconvincing, the mystery lacks a sense of danger, and the resolution is hardly shocking. One wishes that, having dipped into this genre, Egoyan had gone all out and made a film as delightfully sleazy as, say, Basic Instinct. --Sam Graham
Where the Truth Lies (Unrated Theatrical Edition) Reviews:
Who dun it? Who cares? 
2009-09-15 - The story opens in 1957, when Lenny Morris (Kevin Bacon) and Vince Collins (Colin Firth), a famous Martin and Lewis-type act, are hosting a telethon. That night, a dead woman is found in their hotel room and the team breaks up under a cloud of suspicion. Fifteen years later, a young journalist (Alison Lohman) wants to interview Collins for a book and begins to probe the mysterious death.
Bacon and Firth are both fine actors, but they are wasted in this terrible film. Alison Lohman is the main character and she's completely wrong for the part of a savvy young writer; she acts like a high school girl and looks so much like Amy Adams I was distracted and wishing Adams had done the part. She is timid and childish in all of her scenes and just isn't strong enough to carry the film. Firth tries to play against his charmer-image as a sleezy pill-popper, but I didn't believe him for a minute; he seems to be sleepwalking through the movie. Bacon is good as his slimy, heartless partner, but his character is so odious I cringed whenever he was on the screen.
The director apparently thought this was a seductive, sophisticated mystery and used lots of moody film-noir music to try to heighten the drama, but nothing works. The story uses confusing flashbacks every few minutes and I never knew what was going on until the end and then I didn't care. A surprisingly bad and unpleasant movie with unnecessarily graphic sexuality.
Unfairly Underrated Noirish Mystery... 
2009-04-12 - On the recommendation of a writer I know, I sat down with friends to screen the unrated theatrical cut of Atom Egoyen's 2005 film, "Where the Truth Lies" on DVD.
Shuttling back and forth between 1957 and 1972-3, "Where the Truth Lies," tells the story of an young reporter, Karen O'Connor, played by Allison Lohman, who has been contracted to "ghost write" the biography of Vince Collins (a restrained Colin Firth), a semi-retired entertainer turned talent-manager, who once was partnered up in a wildly successful night act with fellow performer, Lanny Morris (an excellent Kevin Bacon), who by the 70's has carved out a career as a producer. O'Connor's publisher, pushes Lohman to dig up the truth behind a mysterious and unsolved 1957 murder of a college student that precipitated the break up of Morris and Collins partnership (very loosely based on the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis act) fifteen years earlier.
Watching "Where the Truth Lies," (I've seen it twice) I was surprised. This is a film that had been savaged by almost all of the reviewers from the major US news outlets for being too sordid, sex-soaked, and critically hamstrung by the performance of the Lohman' point of view character. Perhaps I'm a bit jaded, but while the film is loaded with sex scenes (five by my count) and the goings on are a bit sordid (we are talking about the excesses of successful performers in the 1950's and the decadent, drug-addled, "free love" hangover era, of the pre-disco 1970's) none of the scenes are gratuitous (except possibly a quick throwaway visual gag early in the film) and serve a function in the narrative. Moreover I though Lohman was utterly believable in her role as the ambitious young reporter, who is desperately trying to break into the "big time" with a major scoop - though the show really belongs to Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth playing the performers at the height of their fame in the '50's and later on, as respectively a producer and a talent manager in the 70's. The narrative is well-shot and well-structured (long before films like "Momento" Egoyan was apioneer at the practice of using flashbacks and slightly surreal shifts between subjective experience and "objective" reality to create emotional resonance in audience, particularly in his earlier films, "Exotica" and "The Sweet Hereafter") and features the clever use of repeating motifs, particularly visual and musical references to "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass," references that are entirely appropriate to the movie's rather adult themes.
I really don't understand why this film was so throughly panned when it first came out: for what it's worth I recommend it, and it easily bears repeat viewings (i've seen it twice so far). [...] Get the unrated cut. There's no point in seeing a censored version.
Interesting and amusing 
2009-03-28 - 'Where the truth lies' is a typical drama, its not fiction, its not your regular murder mysteries, just a film that throws light on life. A film that throws light on what goes on behind the curtains, behind the frames, behind every stage, it throws light on the fact that how famous people try to 'keep the show going on!' despite having personal issues. The film is quite unique, if you have the right perspective while watching it. Alison Lohman, Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth have an amazing chemistry with each other. Its a film to watch out for.
where the truth lies 
2009-03-11 - did not like the role that colin firth played i prefer him in more light
happier roles
What A Mess
2008-12-15 - I just finished reading "Where the Truth Lies" and I loved it from start to finish, so I decided to waste my money because I couldn't find it at the local video store and bought it. Now I know why no one keeps it around to rent, because it was outright awful. This is a perfect example of how an excellent book can be destroyed by a film maker.
From start to finish I barely recognized the story and the characters, not to mention some of the most memorable characters in the book not even being mentioned in this film. What was Rupert Holmes thinking when he sold the rights to this producer, or better yet, did Atom Egoyan even read the book?
I'm a big fan of Kevin Bacon and a bigger fan of Colin Firth, but what were they thinking when they signed on to do this bomb? As Vince Collins (Colin Firth) said several times in both the movie and the book "I'm doing this because I need the money" and I truly wonder if that was the real reason. I felt real compassion and really liked the Vince Collins character in the book, what happened to him in this movie? And Kevin Bacon even fell short and lacked the fire that made his character, Lanny Morris, what he truly was in the book.
And who's brillant idea was it to cast Allison Lohman in this stinker? She was to young for this role and I just didn't buy any of her performance.
It would have been nice to see what a director like Clint Eastwood, Ron Howard or Martin Scorsese could have done with this material. What a shame to take a great novel and destroy it like this.
