Full Review

As its clever title suggests, director Atom Egoyan's slick but prurient "Where the Truth Lies" (Thinkfilm) is about "truth" and "lies."

On its surface, the film is a retronoir murder mystery complete with smoky nightclubs, beautiful women, morally ambivalent protagonists, mobsters, voice-over narration and, of course, a dead body.

But this is far from your granddad's whodunit. It contains the kind of raunchy sex scenes -- of various numerical and gender combinations -- that would make Raymond Chandler blush. (The Motion Picture Association of America slapped it with its most restrictive NC-17 rating, but the filmmaker opted to release it unrated.)

Alternately set in the 1950s and 1970s, the story follows a young celebrity journalist, Karen O'Connor (Alison Lohman), who, in researching a tell-all book on a Martin and Lewis-like comedy team (Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon), attempts to uncover the real story behind their breakup 15 years earlier, and the true circumstances of the death of a female fan (Rachel Blanchard) whose body was found in their hotel suite, tainting their careers and rupturing their friendship.

Firth plays urbane Brit Vince Collins, the straight man to Bacon's manic and sexually voracious Lenny Morris (or as Egoyan puts it, the "ego" to Lenny's "id.")

Enamored with the performers since childhood when she was chosen to come onstage during their annual telethon (a treasured memory), Karen finds herself increasingly entangled in a web of deceit as she hones in on the fateful night (pieced together through "Rashomon"-style flashbacks).

Letting her emotions get the better of her, she becomes romantically involved with one of them.

With "The Sweet Hereafter" and "Ararat," Egoyan proved himself a thoughtful director capable of tackling heavy subjects (the death of a child, genocide) and complex stories. But this movie -- his most mainstream to date -- is more style than substance.

Indeed, Phillip Barker's plush production design captures the ring-a-ding glamour of the Rat-Pack milieu and Michael Danna's Bernard Herrmann-flavored score sets the proper seductive mood.

Firth and Bacon both deliver standout performances with ingenue Lohman, who, though beautiful, is the weak dramatic link in the triangular chain (she seems like a little girl playing grownup).

Based on the novel by Broadway playwright-composer Rupert ("The Mystery of Edwin Drood," "Remember WENN") Holmes, who again weds his fondness for murder mysteries to a wallow in nostalgia, the film has pretensions of exploring the nature of truth and the oft-abused power of celebrity.

But if "truth" be told, these themes seem a flimsy excuse for so much soft-core sleaze and gratuitous nudity. (A quick glance at the film's poster -- a barebacked beauty teasingly draped in slinky red satin -- would cue most viewers to the same conclusion.) Egoyan does deserve credit for at least exercising restraint while filming the big "shocker" -- what actually happened on that night -- and making it less graphic than it could have been, though it is still pretty sordid stuff.

Blue content aside, from an artistic standpoint, with its convoluted and suspense-free script, "Where the Truth Lies" is a letdown as a mystery.

The film contains several strong sex scenes, including an orgy, a lesbian encounter and a menage a trois, full-frontal nudity, homoerotic themes, a suicide, drug content, a brutal beating, and sporadic rough and crude language. The USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is O -- morally offensive. Not rated by the Motion Picture Association of America.

These movies have been evaluated for artistic merit and moral suitability by the media reviewing division of Catholic News Service. The reviews include the CNS rating, the Motion Picture Association of America rating, and a brief synopsis of the movie.

The classifications are as follows:

A-I -- general patronage;
A-II -- adults and adolescents;
A-III -- adults;
L -- limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling. L replaces the previous classification, A-IV.
O -- morally offensive.

Note: Some movies previously were designated A-IV. Older films with this classification should be regarded as classified L.