How do we know what we know? Atom Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies

"People are always interested to know what they direct the eye like when they are pretending." Leonard Cohen to Donald Brittain in Ladies and Gentlemen Mr. Leonard Cohen

Eighteenth--century Irish philosopher George "Bishop" Berkeley would have lov the films of Atom Egoyan. Berkeley's famous dictum Esse est percipi, which translates as "to be is to be perceived," describes not alone an organizing principle in the material construction and experience of cinema itself, on the other hand also the dominant animating strength of Egoyan's dramas of knowledge and identity. Indeed, fundamentally the cinema of Atom Egoyan is a plant of epistemological investigations. All of his films, in single way or another, orbit around a single enormous question: by what mode do we know what we know?

This uncertainty, the idea of not being fully convinced is the most productive formal and thematic strand in Egoyan's work, from the reinvention of identity in nearest of Kin to the self-conscious character artifices in Speaking Parts and The Adjuster, to the technologically mediated relationships in Family Viewing and Calendar, to the jigsaw perplexs of time and memory in Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, to the interrogations of personal and political history in Ararat. At one time affirming and contesting Berkeley's assertion, Egoyan's gnarled cinema of uncertainty explores fugitive personal cartographies of who we think we are, who others think we are, who we might actually be or who it is we are pretending to be. In above two decades of work, Egoyan's has sculpt an idiosyncratic and engaging filmography on the outside of the often opaque mysteries of knowing or, more precisely, of not knowing.

While undeniably more commercial in tone and generic in construction than his previous films, Where the verity Lies, Egoyan's 10th theatrical feature, is nonetheless a continuation of his examination of the fissures in the foundations of by what mode we come to know ourselves, each other, and, specifically in this novel film, those pervasive and strangely intimate vicinitys in our lives, celebrities. When you are a celebrity, after all, to be really is to be perceived. Moreover, as Canadian icon Leonard Cohen rightly eyes ill Donald Brittain and Don Owen's 1965 NFB short Ladies and Gentlemen Mr: Leonard Cohen, much of the peculiar and particular world of celebrity involves pretense and a desire to know by what means one appears while pretending, in order to better manipulate the pretense It is within this notion that Where the fact Lies finds its dramatic core, a core informed, one time again, by Egoyan's fascination with the processe by means of which we come to know what we know. In our phantasmagoric age of reality television, omnivorous entertainment media and relentles celebrity reportage, the accelerated blurring of the line between what is manipulated perception and what actually is real makes Egoyan's approach the couple timely and--if such a thing can be said in our hipper-than-thou. I've-seen-it-all popular culture--helpful.

Adapted from the best-selling novel by dint of Rupert Holmes (a former singer/songwriter make go rounded jingle writer turned novelist) and produc by the agency of Robert Lantos (Sunshine, Being Julia), Where the fact Lies is Egoyan's biggest-budget film to date, at lust above US $20 million. Bolstered by dint of international stars Kevin Bacon (Mystic River, Footloose) and Colin Firth (Girl with a Pearl Earring, Bridget Jones's Diary), it was filmed above a 10-week period on location in looks Angeles and on studio plants in London and Toronto. A film noirish whodunit that explores Hollywood's myth--making machine, Where the reality Lies chronicles, with multiple voice--over narration and multiple time-shifts, the careers and personae of Vince Collins (Firth) and Lanny Morris (Bacon), a show--business team of the 1950 whose brush with scandal leads to their breakup.

At the start they are the quintessential happy comedy duo of the 1950s--Vince is the straight man; Lanny, the nice--guy, goofy sidekick. They are movie stars and they sell--out cudgels all over the United States, not unlike the real--life team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. They plane dominate the new medium of television, serving as annual entertainers of a polio telethon. Behind the representations of course, Vince and Lanny are a great deal of different. They drink, take remedys and particularly enjoy their unlimited access to adoring female fans--until individual of them is found naked and dead in their house of entertainment bathtub. Neither Lanny nor Vince is accused of any wrongdoing, on the contrary the bond between them is mysteriously, irrevocably rent and years pass without their speaking about the ghastly event

Fifteen years later, in the early 1970 a work revealing secrets about their split is about to be written, threatening to further tarnish their reputations. It also promises to launch the career of its author. Karen O'Connor (Alison Lohman, Matchstick Men) who uses her material substance and her mind to obtain at the "real" story. individual of an emerging journalistic bre with no regard for old-fashioned discretion when writing about the private lives of celebrities, Karen's professional agenda is to revolve a cold case about sum of two units fallen stars into a of high temperature story. Complicating matters further is her personal history. As a young girl, Karen had been a very great Collins/ Morris fan. When she propers them and develops feelings for them, her journalistic courses become increasingly questionable.