Where the Truth Lies (2005) – 2.0

What the hell happened to Atom Egoyan.  The once-masterful director of Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter crashes and burns with his latest, a murder-mystery featuring Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth as a pair of pill-popping womanizers who were a modestly famous comedy duo in the 1950s, but whose careers were ruined when a girl wound up dead in their hotel suite.  The film alternates between the ’50s and ’70s, when a young journalist, Karen O’Connor (Alison Lohman), tracks the now estranged pair down, determined to find out the truth for a tell-all biography.  With the film’s themes of blond obsession and the seedy Hollywood underworld, Egoyan clearly struggles in the wake of Mulholland Drive; he vainly attempts to one-up Lynch using a plethora of soft-focus camerawork and laughably “explicit” sex scenes, but never stands a chance.  I might have taken some pity on Egoyan if not for his shockingly erroneous casting of Lohman in the central role.  As much as Naomi Watts made Mulholland Drive, Lohman single-handedly ruins this film, looking for all the world like a 10-year-old dressed up as a sexpot, and delivering every line with a halting, dumb-blond awkwardness.  Only Bacon escapes the wreckage relatively unscathed, but who cares.  The film is an appalling failure on Egoyan’s part, and a true lowpoint in what was once such a promising career.