Grade: C

It’s probably a bit of serendipity that Atom Egoyan’s “Where The Truth Lies” has reached theatres just as Jerry Lewis’ print memoir of his career with Dean Martin is being released, but the coincidence certainly can’t help but bring the movie some added attention. Based on a novel by Rupert Holmes, it involves the scandalous reasons behind the breakup of a 1950s comedy team obviously modeled on Martin and Lewis.

Presented in “Citizen Kane” style as an investigation conducted some fifteen years after the event (the breakup supposedly occurred in 1957, with a book researcher uncovering what actually happened in 1972), it’s intended to be a cinematic puzzle whose pieces only gradually fall into place as narrative feints and sleights of hand are swept away–it’s hardly accidental that the words “truth” and “lies” are both included in the title–the picture is mostly fun to watch. But it’s also not much more than a cheeky stunt, not unlike Peter Bogdanovich’s “Cat’s Meow” in its effect (though that movie was based on an actual event). Coming from a director like Egoyan, “Where the Truth Lies” seems more divertissement than personal statement–which is what his previous pictures have been.

The stand-up duo here consists of Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon), the wild, crazy guy, and Vince Collins (Colin Firth), the suave straight-man, and we first meet them as they’re finishing a 1957 telethon suspiciously similar to Lewis’ long-running muscular dystrophy efforts. Despite the fact that nothing that’s shown of the duo’s performance there (or in the nightclub routines also periodically presented) would suggest any real chemistry between the guys or any special quality that might endear them to audiences, they’re purportedly so huge a success that even a big-time mobster like Sally Sanmarco (Maury Chaykin, never really managing to seem genuinely threatening) insists that they play his hotel in order to draw guaranteed crowds. The pair seem to have a solid working relationship, but that’s shattered when the naked body of a young woman is discovered in the bathtub of their suite in Sanmarco’s palatial place, and they split up.

Fifteen years later, young Karen O’Connor (Alison Lohman) aims to make her mark in the publishing world by unraveling the mystery behind the death via a series of interviews with the reclusive Collins–a project that hardly endears her to Morris, with whom she arranges an “accidental” meeting but who dismisses her invitation to participate by telling her he’s working on a memoir of his own. As Karen’s queries expand, certain troublesome facts come to light. Vince, it appears, has a dark side that demonstrated itself in violent outbursts during the team’s heyday. And Lanny is an inveterate womanizer who has always rejoiced in using his celebrity (and his ever-loyal assistant Reuben, played by a stiffly officious David Hayman) to seduce attractive women–including, it becomes apparent, not only Karen herself but the girl whose death caused the rift between the men.

“Where The Truth Lies” eventually disclose what actually happened back in 1957, though it does so in a fractured, deviously contorted way that’s not nearly as clever as it wants to be, and the revelation turns out to be one of the hoariest of detective-story cliches. (Maybe that’s intended to be the joke, but it’s a pretty flat one.) The picture’s effectiveness is further hampered by the casting. Bacon is an extraordinarily talented actor who’s done some marvelous work lately, but he seems miscast here, never conveying Lanny’s manic disposition successfully (though he’s better at the man’s dark calculation). Similarly, Firth captures Collins’ dark side well enough, but the charm Vince is supposed to possess eludes him. And Lohman is simply bland–rather like a stiff version of Scarlett Johansson. (The investigator in “Kane” was, too, but at least he was kept in the shadows rather than pushed into the limelight.) And though in the rather brightly-lit, sumptuous cinematography of Paul Sarossy the picture looks lovely, the period detail often looks slightly off despite the yeoman efforts of production designer Phillip Barker, art directors Craig Lathrop and Lucy Richardson, and costume designer Beth Pasternak (though, to be fair, it would appear that all were working under budgetary limitations).

It’s a measure of the failure of “Where The Truth Lies” to get things quite right that when Morris and Collins finish their supposedly 1957 telethon, they do so by singing the great Sondheim-Styne song “Together.” It certainly fits. The only problem is that “Together” was written for the Ethel Merman musical “Gypsy,” which didn’t premiere until two years later. A period piece–even a lighthearted one–needs to get those kinds of details right. This one doesn’t–characteristic of a picture that, while superficially engaging, ends up in retrospect seeming a very thin, and surprisingly ramshackle, contrivance.

C+

Given that “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang” is divided into segments titled after books by Raymond Chandler, a little story about that author might be in order. When Chandler’s convoluted mystery “The Big Sleep” was being converted into a film script (it was eventually made by Howard Hawks in 1946, and has justly become a classic), it’s reported that the writers–who included William Faulkner–contacted Chandler for enlightenment about certain twists of the plot that they didn’t understand. They couldn’t tell, in particular, whether one character’s death was a suicide, an accident, or a murder–and if the latter, who the killer was. Chandler thought the matter over and replied that he had no idea. Shane Black might have to respond the same way if he were asked to explain some of the turns of this writing-directing debut, a picture that’s essentially an updated takeoff on 1940s film noir classics like “Sleep.” The movie is an elaborate conceit that buffs will have fun deconstructing. But ultimately it’s just too clever for its own good–so knowing, so self-satisfied, that by the end the smug artificiality of it all has become well-nigh intolerable. The actors seem to be winking at the audience every thirty seconds or so, and eventually you feel that you’ve been nudged in the ribs so relentlessly that your bones are beginning to ache–and not from laughter.

The underlying premise here is that Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey, Jr.), a petty thief, escapes the police one December night by stumbling into an audition for a Hollywood movie role and proving so convincing playing his weepy scene that he’s at once whisked off to California for a screen test. Since he’s up for the part of a pulp private eye, the studio assigns him a teacher–a real P.I. named Perry (Val Kilmer), who just happens to be gay. Harry, though, takes his would-be shamus screen persona too seriously when he gets involved with Harmony Faith Lane (Michelle Monaghan), an old childhood sweetheart whom he convinces that he actually is a gumshoe. She pushes him to disentangle the connections that link several dead women, one of whom turns out to be her sister. Also involved in the convoluted goings-on are a rich heiress and her father Harlan Dexter (Corbin Bernsen), a former actor still involved in the movie biz. But what the movie is mostly about is overripe dialogue, especially that delivered by Downey in the smart-aleck narration that runs through the picture; outrageous plots twists involving misidentified bodies and wild motivations; lots of slapstick violence, including one “Trouble With Harry” sequence about a clumsy attempt to dispose of an inconvenient corpse and another elaborate gag in which a severed digit plays a prominent role; plenty of gay-themed banter between Downey and Kilmer; and a big finale–or really, series of climaxes–which include fistfights, car chases and some gunfire, too. Though there’s an effort at the close to explain everything, it’s a pretty perfunctory effort with tongue firmly in cheek (apart from a misguided bit of business about child molestation).

There’s little question that Black is a canny wordsmith, or that he’s peppered his script with an abundance of amusing lines. And the virtual incomprehensibility of the plot is part of the joke. Downey certainly holds up his end of the equation–even though Harry is pretty much an insufferable smart-ass, he delivers the character’s voiceovers with the proper combination of sass and whimsy–and Kilmer seems to be having enormous fun playing a smooth, slick pro who just happens to be unabashedly gay. And while the rest of the cast doesn’t match them–Monaghan is particularly disappointing, never generating the Bacall-like heat Holly demands–the picture has been stylishly made in all the technical departments, with a slick production design by Aaron Osborne and elegant widescreen camerawork by Michael Barrett.

But in the final analysis “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang” is all affectation and no affect. You can easily admire the skill with which Black has constructed this elaborate joke, but rather like Steve Martin’s “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” (1982), an even more extravagant riff on this genre, ultimately it runs out of gas and becomes a rather exhausting jape.