Ricky Gervais's first film as a director hinges on the sort of high-concept, neatly wrought conceit that Woody Allen might once have dashed off as a short story for the New Yorker. It is set in an America that is not so much a bright, shining lie as a blunt, bruising truth, inhabited by people who are pathologically honest, both in their opinions of others and about their own crippling lack of self-esteem. A TV advert for Coca-Cola confesses that "it's basically just brown sugar-water". The rival brand shoots back that Pepsi is perfect "for when they don't have Coke".
Gervais plays Mark Bellison, a Babbittish loser in an anonymous town whose life is galvanised when he tells the world's first lie ("I said something that wasn't"). Before long he is spinning all manner of self-serving fictions. He wins his job back, makes a fortune and starts to look like a viable mate for the beautiful Anna (Jennifer Garner), a woman who has previously regarded him with open scorn.
So far, so good-ish. By now The Invention of Lying has settled into a machine-tooled groove. It is slick and it is funny. But it is also too obviously schematic, while that romantic subplot can feel awfully synthetic at times. However pleasing on the eye, Anna is too much a product of this drab, unimaginative planet to merit anything approaching sympathy.
Then, out of nowhere, the film swings off in a wild new direction. To comfort his dying mother, Bellison tells the biggest whopper of them all. Is Mrs Bellison destined for a "world of eternal nothingness"? Absolutely not, insists her son. After death, she will instead be whisked to a place of boundless happiness and palatial mansions, presided over by an all-powerful "Man in the Sky". The news is so electrifying that Bellison finds himself adopted as a messiah. He goes on to write the gospel on a pair of pizza cartons and starts carrying himself like some debauched Jesus; white-robed and bearded and reclining on a four-poster bed.
It is at this point that The Invention of Lying achieves vertiginous lift-off. Perhaps it also marks the moment when it becomes something rather radical. It's one thing for Gervais to air his atheism on the standup circuit. It's quite another to do so in the guise of a glossy, user-friendly sitcom pitched squarely at the huddled masses in the American multiplex. So Gervais bamboozles us and suckers us in. His comedy pretends to be unthreatening, a harmless little wheeze, and then pushes the envelope to its logical conclusion. For good measure, it is also smart and supple enough to acknowledge that lying is not all bad. After all, don't the best kind of falsehoods amount to a valuable creative endeavour? They grease the wheels of social interaction and slap the world with a fresh coat of paint.
Small wonder that Gervais, like Bellison, is broadly in favour of telling tales. Lying (in its most benign form) is a liberator. It can lead not to heaven but the next best thing: an alternative meritocracy in which good genes and a firm jawline can be trumped by an unprepossessing nerd with the gift of the gab; a land where a self-styled "fat, middle-aged loser" can become a star. Lie long enough and well enough and your dream becomes reality.
