Akascribe A personal blog covering all manner of subjects

As luck would have it, I managed to convince my wife that we should expend our precious Saturday date night seeing the new Ricky Gervais film, The Invention of Lying.  I say luck, because in life timing is everything, and as I just posted, a public hoax is front and media center today.  And that ties in very nicely to the core message of the film.

A spoiler alert:  this review, by necessity, must discuss in detail the plot conceits of the movie.

I had an inkling from the SF Chronicle review that the film had a bigger agenda than just positing a world where no one knows how to lie – and Mark, the character played by Gervais, is the first person to figure out how.  This would have been amusing, sort of the inverse of the forgettable 1997 Jim Carrey flick, Liar Liar, where his character was the only one who must speak the truth.  But Gervais obviously has bigger fish to fry.  And not just on Friday during Lent.

For you see, the really big lie that Mark perpetrates is his invention of the whole Muslim-Judeo-Christian concept of the Afterlife.  Mark does this for the simple and forgivable reason that he can’t stand to see his elderly mother on her deathbed fearing the nothingness that is to come.  So Mark concocts a comforting story about a place she will go to after she dies, where she will be young and happy and be with the people she loves.  This does the trick and she dies content.  The only problem – some hospital workers have overheard and turn Mark into a kind of Messiah.  And then we’re really off to the races.  Before you can say “parting of the Red Sea,” Mark has assumed the role of a latter-day Moses, creating the notion of God (or as he calls Him, “The Man in the Sky”) and transcribing the eternal heavenly truths on two take-out pizza boxes (a particularly inspired comedic stroke on the part of Gervais).

Religious believers should be excused for not taking too much offense, because there is nothing malicious about Mark’s big lie.  All he wants is his old job back (as a screenwriter at the movie studio that churns out boring armchair recountings of history) and to get the girl, in this case Jennifer Garner.  But she’s hung up on his subpar genetic profile, more specifically that he’s fat and has a stubby nose.  What’s a poor gospel to do?

The movie is merely good – it’s no masterpiece of the genre, like Groundhog Day – but Gervais had a lot of courage to make the film he did, that both pays comedic dividends and gets his atheist point across.  What amazes me is that so little attention has been paid to the obvious message of the film, that religion is a total crock.  (Sorry, Gervais puts this much softer but that’s basically what he’s saying.)  I mean, why isn’t the Christian Right mobilizing to picket movie theatres and castigate Gervais as a godless sinner?  Is the message of the film really so subtly packaged that they’ve missed it entirely?  I guess so, but for me (a confirmed atheist since I was 6 years old) the movie was a revelation.  It’s not often you get to see a mainstream media offering poke fun at the absurdity of the Bible’s stories and get away with it.  Well, mostly.

You see, I generally admire the film reviews of Anthony Lane in the New Yorker so I was surprised, after seeing the film, to read his intensely negative review.  He seemed to take particular offense at the religious plot-line and even criticized Gervais for being off-base, since the real-life gospels “believed what they foretold, whereas Mark makes it up as he goes along.”  Now we will of course never know what John the Baptist et al really were thinking all those centuries ago, but if Lane is serious that those ancient dudes all literally believed the stories of the Old and New Testaments, including the fishes into loaves, Noah’s ark, etc., and didn’t just juice them a bit for allegorical purposes, then he is betraying his own religious naivety.  And all of this makes Lane miss the essential point, that The Invention of Lying works just fine as a piece of entertainment, even though it packs a much stronger punch.

I guess some people just can’t take a joke.