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107 MINUTES | KENDALL SQUARE + EMBASSY Atom Egoyan has made brilliant movies about memory, twisted sex, violent death, and lost innocence. Where the Truth Lies isn’t one of them. Unlike Exotica (1994) and The Sweet Hereafter (1997), films that haunt the imagination, this one has trash as its dominant mode. Writing a biography of washed-up entertainer Vince Collins (Colin Firth), the former partner of Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon) in one of the hottest show-biz acts of the ’50s (they’re based on Martin and Lewis but seem more like Rowan and Martin), an ambitious journalist (Alison Lohman) tries to get him to talk about the notorious night when a woman’s body was discovered in their hotel suite. The truth proves more quaint than shocking. Egoyan’s use of recurring narrative and unreliable point of view almost seduces until the plot convolutions and cornball melodrama take over. Of course, it’s the sex and the NC-17 rating that Truth will be remembered for, an exercise in the absurdity of censorship that was better covered in Egoyan’s 1991 film The Adjuster.
BY PETER KEOUGH
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