Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen star in ‘The Good Liar’
‘The Good Liar’: Mirren and McKellen are terrific, but seeing this movie once is plenty. No lie.
Directed by: Bill Condon
Written by: Jeffrey Hatcher, based on the novel by Nicholas Searle
Starring: Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen
“The Good Liar” – “It’s weirdly difficult to lie on screen. As an actor, you really have to believe that you are telling the truth. In reality, you know that you aren’t telling the truth…but you have to utterly convince yourself, as the character, that you’re telling the truth.” - Helen Mirren
“What’s trickier than straight-forward lying is the lying being badly done.” – Ian McKellen
Betty McLeish’s (Helen Mirren) husband died within the last year, but she feels ready to start dating again. It’s 2009, and she embarks on a path like most singles do: online dating.
She likes Roy Courtnay’s (Ian McKellen) dating profile, and whoo hoo, the feeling is mutual. Their first date goes well, and before you can say, “Second date,” Betty invites Roy to move in, and he suggests that they form a joint checking account.
Say what?
Her grandson Steven (Russell Tovey), however, is the voice of reason, and he believes that she is moving way too fast. Oh, he’s not feeling the warm fuzzies for Roy either. With good reason, because we discover very early in the first act, that Roy is a con man. He’s a professional swindler who invites marks into his fake real estate schemes, and his partners and he run away with easy six-figure scores.
For Roy, life is good, and he’s a good liar. Now, he is setting a trap for Betty to embezzle her life savings, worth over 2.5 million British pounds.
Director Bill Condon splits his time between making substantial, weighty dramas like “Mr. Holmes” (2015) and “Kinsey” (2004) and fluff pieces like the two-part series finale “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn” (2011, 2012), so he falls somewhere in between with “The Good Liar”. This is a light thriller, a con artist picture with two masterclass thespians.
McKellen seems to be having a ball as Roy. His character – with sociopath tendencies - pretends to have affections for Betty in one moment, and then calculates his hopeful windfall in the next. He’s a total creep, however Betty is easily fooled, as she drops all defenses and openly lets this wolf into the hen house. Mirren perfectly plays a damsel void of distress, although the script and its pacing undermine her efforts.
The film is based on Nicholas Searle’s novel, and one might imagine that the author builds Roy’s trap over a couple hundred pages, but in the film, Betty drops her aforementioned resistance within the first 30 on-screen minutes. One moviegoer might be caught up in the drama, turn to their friend or date and say, “Has Betty lost her mind?”
For others, her extreme naivety may not believable, and they could opine, “It’s so stupid that Betty is this stupid.”
In any film adaptation, jamming a novel’s narrative into a 100-page screenplay can be a daunting challenge, and writer Jeffrey Hatcher cannot quite get this one to fit, especially when the happy couple takes a holiday to another European city, and suddenly, a flashback into the way distant past seems like we’ve been shuttled to another movie entirely.
Quite frankly, this film does not play fair, but admittedly, it is a joy to see Mirren and McKellen figuratively dance around, with and through Roy’s lies, and since this is a con artist film, expect the unexpected. Condon and Hatcher leave us some clues, but it might take a second viewing to catch them. Then again, seeing this movie just once is plenty. No lie.
(2.5/4 stars)
Jeff – a member of the Phoenix Critics Circle – has penned film reviews since 2008, graduated from ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and is a certified Rotten Tomatoes critic. Follow Jeff and the Phoenix Film Festival on Twitter @MitchFilmCritic and @PhoenixFilmFest, respectively.
