Where The Truth Lies - Release - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Manohla Dargis of the New York Times observed, "Mr. Egoyan . . . tends to stray from the storytelling straight and narrow, taking a generally metafictional approach to narrative. Here, he seems to want to deconstruct celebrity through the familiar mechanics of a murder mystery. Yet because he also doesn't want to be imprisoned by genre, he tries to shake loose its rules, much as Robert Altman did in 1973 with his laid-back take on Raymond Chandler's Long Goodbye. It almost works, at least in part . . . In the end, it is Mr. Egoyan's fealty to the novel, its feints and dodges, that proves the film's undoing." She called Kevin Bacon "excellent" but questioned "the calamitous miscasting" of Alison Lohman, "whose ingénue looks and uncontrolled voice are wildly out of sync with the film's other performances and self-consciously lurid atmosphere . . . he has neither the chops nor the core mystery that might have made Mr. Egoyan's pseudo-David Lynch ambitions for his film fly."

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called it "film noir right down to the plot we can barely track; we're reminded of William Faulkner asking Raymond Chandler who did it in The Big Sleep and Chandler saying he wasn't sure . . . Atom Egoyan, no stranger to labyrinthine plots, makes this one into a whodunit puzzle crossed with some faraway echoes of Sunset Boulevard . . . I have seen Where the Truth Lies twice and enjoyed it more when I understood its secrets."

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone rated the film one star, calling it a "monumental misfire" and adding, "This movie isn't over-the-top - it doesn't know where the top is. Trash addicts will eat up every graphic minute, even if they prefer to wait for the DVD."

Ruthe Stein of the San Francisco Chronicle called the film "compulsively watchable even as laughably over-the-top moments start piling up. To be truthful, most of it is high-gloss trash. I'm prepared to recommend Truth despite this - or maybe because of it . . . Bacon has the showier role, and he wrings everything he can out of it. But Firth is equally impressive . . . Truth's descent into camp happens mostly during the scenes set in the '70s. Lohman is a big part of the problem . . . she's so shrill and annoying as Karen that you end up wishing she were the one floating in that tub."

Todd McCarthy of Variety called the film "unconvincing" and "jumbled" and added, "Fractured narrative devices are further encumbered by multiple narration sources, incidental characters who function as mere devices, and uncertain time frames. More bothersome still is the stiff, on-topic nature of most of the film; with Karen in full interrogation mode nearly all the time, scenes and characters are rarely allowed to breathe and develop of their own accord . . . a problem unrelieved by Lohman's performance, which reveals nothing beneath the surface or between the lines. Bacon and Firth both prove more than adept at conveying their characters' seamy sides, which at least lends weight to the distasteful revelations in which the story is rooted, and are reasonably effective overall in cutting the desired profiles of glib entertainers taking full advantage of fame's perks."

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian rated the film two out of five stars, saying it had "rich potential for suspense, for drama, for comedy, for tragedy, for historical colour, for just about everything. Yet in the most perplexing way, Egoyan's movie doesn't properly deliver on any of these. It is muddled, over-wrought, and somehow too cerebral and fastidious to tell the story straight . . . There are diverting moments but it adds up to nothing in particular. The question is not so much where the truth lies, but why we should care in the first place."

Philip French of The Observer called the film "a rich brew that draws on Citizen Kane and Rashomon" and ultimately "holds the attention and makes us want to know the outcome."