Egoyan’s ‘Truth’ lights up fest
BY ROGER EBERT
May 16, 2005
Chicago Sun-Times Inc.
CANNES, France — Because the party was being given for Atom Egoyan and
because he has made a terrific new film and is a nice guy, I went to
it. People have been known to shed blood to attend the parties every
night in the beachfront restaurants, but I would pay good money to get
out of most of them. The parties are always the same: Too many people,
too much smoke, not enough food, music to rupture your eardrums and
weird lights in your eyes. The caterers here must have trained on
“The Manchurian Candidate.” I’ve never been able to understand why
hosts allow music so loud they have to go out on the beach and talk
to their guests on cell phones.
Egoyan, however, was in a rare mood, because his movie “Where the Truth
Lies” is one of the big successes of the first weekend at Cannes,
which is off to its best start in years. His film stars Kevin Bacon
and Colin Firth as a show biz team in the 1950s who will remind all
sentient viewers of Martin and Lewis, although everyone connected
with the film swears they were the last two people on their minds.
When the naked body of a dead blonde is found in the bathtub of
a casino suite in Atlantic City, a scandal is created that echoes
through the years, until in the 1970s a young blonde investigative
journalist (Alison Lohman) tries to solve the mystery. Although the
movie has a magnificently convoluted noir plot, its strongest quality
is the nature of the film’s human relationships; I was blindsided
by a crime movie where the journalist’s reason for not revealing the
solution is inspired by kindness.
Bacon is on a roll now, after “Mystic River,” “The Woodsman” and
now “Where the Truth Lies.” Along the way, something intriguing
has happened to his face, which used to be clean-cut and without
complications, and has deepened into character and mystery; everyone
eventually grows into the correct age for their face, and Bacon
is, right now, able to do more with a closeup than some actors can
accomplish with a soliloquy.
Egoyan is the Canadian director of films that deal powerfully with
eroticism, not as a subject but more as a problem. His credits include
“Exotica” (1994) and “The Sweet Hereafter” (1997), for which he won
Oscar nominations for writing and directing.
Egoyan introduced me to his father and said that his father does
not like this film but his mother does. The last time he had a
film at Cannes, “Ararat,” about the Turkish massacre of Armenians,
he invited his mother to attend. She didn’t like it, but his father
did. “My father is more political about Armenia, my mother is more
assimilationist,” he said. Yes, but the fact that he has two parents
who tell their son what they really think about his films may help
explain why he makes such good ones.
“Dad immigrated from Armenia to Canada, studied for three years at the
Art Institute of Chicago and became an abstract expressionist painter,”
Egoyan told me, “but then he had a show in Paris that didn’t sell,
and so he went into the furniture business.” Someone says one sentence
to you, and it’s a short story.