The Hazardous Lives of Pretty Journalists

Watch on YouTube

A beautiful woman is found dead in the hotel room of a famous double act and, fifteen years later, another woman tries to get to the truth behind the matter in 2005's Where the Truth Lies. Another Atom Egoyan film featured on Criterion this month, this one's much closer to what I would have expected from the director of Chloe and Exotica; a pulpy, slightly campy daydream dressed up as a thriller. It's a lot of fun.

Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth play Lanny and Vince, a double act very obviously modelled on Martin and Lewis. One morning, just before the two are scheduled to host a telethon, a dead woman is found in their bathtub. The autopsy is said to point to a drug overdose but, fifteen years later, a young reporter named Karen (Alison Lohman) gets to work ghostwriting an autobiography for Vince and starts to realise there's something fishy about the dead woman, or, more accurately, lobster-y. What do I mean by that? That would be a spoiler but, suffice to say, we see her with lobsters at one point.

Some critics said Lohman was miscast but I would say that's precisely where critics didn't understand the movie. Lohman is absolutely perfect, if you ask me, because she seems so wrong. Her elaborate, anachronistically '40s hairstyles never look natural on the ruthless, trashy teen from Bully. She seems like a kinky gal engaged in sexual role play. It may be fairer to say Kevin Bacon was miscast. Someone with a sense of comedic timing would have been better in the Jerry Lewis role. I've been watching The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel again lately and this movie almost seems set in the same universe in which the viewer has to strain their imagination to take the professional entertainers at the centre of the stories as geniuses despite nothing they say on stage being funny.

The film's mostly interior locations, shot in England though set in L.A., add to the sense of artificiality. I was interested in the murder mystery but mostly as an aphrodisiac, a pretext for the sexual tension and sex.

Where the Truth Lies lies on The Criterion Channel.