It's a shame that Atom Egoyan's new picture has been defined by the NC-17 rating the MPAA slapped on it, for the film is about far more than the explicit sex it contains. If one is to be blunt about it, the actual content of Where The Truth Lies is problematic in its own right; but those problems, and the pleasures that come with them, should be left for audiences to discover. Instead, what mainstream awareness of the film might exist will begin and end with the explicit sex, since the rating (or lackethereof, which is what Egoyan and his distributor, ThinkFilm, settled on in this case) effectively prevents the film from being advertised and exhibited in a commercial fashion. Intelligent, adult cinema continues to be quelled by a faction of the very system that produces it.

Where The Truth Lies is indeed an adult film, and an intelligent one - to an extent. It is a mystery that embraces its own lurid, noirish nature, but Egoyan has trouble reconciling those elements with the more humanistic qualities that always take precedence in his films. One senses that his attention is consistently drawn towards the foibles of his characters and the layers that mask them, rather than the wheels of the plot that he must continue to keep pace with. He maintains a fairly good balance between pulp trash and character study through most of the film, but then comes an ending that is just too preposterous to accept. I think it's impossible for Egoyan to make a film that isn't complex on a whole multitude of levels, which is a great thing in general but ends up being bad for this picture.

The mystery begins in the late 50s, when a girl's corpse is found in a bathtub in the hotel suite of popular comedy duo Vince Collins (Colin Firth) and Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon). It continues in the 70s, as a young journalist named Karen O'Connor (Alison Lohman) investigates both the death and Vince and Lanny themselves, who were cleared of any charges but never performed together again. Karen wants to write the definitive book on the pair; more than that, she wants to satisfy her own curiosity, for in her schoolgirl days she was their number one fan, and the possibility that one or both of her idols might be a killer both terrifies and titillates her.

That disposition is where the truth, for Egoyan, ultimately lies; the solution to the mystery is related to but less interesting than his study of the dual nature of celebrity, and how those natures appeal to and are perceived by us, the adoring, condemning public. Out of this conflict comes one of the best elements of the film: Kevin Bacon's performance as Lanny, the ostensibly wild and zany half of the duo, the Lewis to Vince's Martin. The first time he appears in the film, he's cracking wise and singing his heart out on a national telethon and stealing the heart of 13 year old Karen; when she and we catch up with him fifteen years later, that winning grin is wearing thin around the edges and his eyes are dull and distant. We see him in his heyday, smoldering in the bedroom, and then again when he seduces Karen after their first meeting, where he seems more compelled by the belief that she expects this of him, rather than any real desire on his part. His public and private faces have merged, and the complexity with which Bacon depicts this rivals any of the twists and turns the narrative might take at.

Firth is good too, and his less showy role could have been the standout, had it not been undermined by the necessity to keep certain things secret, to let the plot unfold in the restrictive, predetermined manner of a murder mystery. I don't think it was a mistake on Egoyan's part to try to make a genre film. I do think he did a good job at adapting the aesthetic conventions of the genre to his purposes; the film looks and and sounds gorgeous, with a Herrmann-esque score by Mychael Danna and glossy photography by Paul Sarossy that makes the film look like a technicolor noir. But compare this film to Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education, which also was a character study under the guise of a murder mystery, told in exactly the same style and manner (and which also, incidentally, received an NC-17 rating). Almodovar's playful, exuberant touch worked in concert with any overcooked genre conventions, but Egoyan's approach is so serious (rightly so, from a certain perspective) that it frequently rubs up awkwardly against his stylistic conceits., When it comes to the distended denoument, that severity topples the credibility of the film entirely; some viewers might find the closing scenes of the film unintentionally humorous.

Other less discerning audiences (or even those unaware of Egoyan's sublime earlier work) might find the the swirl of wanton eroticism and mystery entirely intoxicating. Unfortunately, it may never reach those audiences; the ratings board, in their infinite wisdom, has taken care of that. I dug my own grave by mentioning that NC-17 rating outright in this review, and thus I must fill it here by mentioning the scene that the MPAA took umbrage with. It's the one sex scene in the film that is utterly clear in its intent, necessary in its explicitness, and perfect in every aspect of its execution. I won't reveal the details of it here, but I will say that, when one compares it to a preceding sex scene, an even more unpleasant image of the ratings board emerges; one in which the deciding factor isn't explicitness as much as it is a sad, unpleasant social bias.