Things have not been rosy in the life of English Canada’s number-two auteur. For one thing, his career post-Sweet Hereafter has consisted of a couple of indifferent projects (Felicia’s Journey and Ararat) that underwhelmed critics and performed poorly at the box-office; for another, film funding under Telefilm Canada’s Richard Stursberg has pandered to vague notions of “commercialism” and marginalized the kind of work our man traditionally does. It’s clear under the circumstances than Atom Egoyan needs a hit in the worst possible way—and to prove the point, he’s consented to produce something in the Goodfellas/Boogie Nights idiom to which he’s never been remotely drawn. Turns out that the resulting Where the Truth Lies is a batshit-crazy collision of wretchedly excessive material and a man who acts like he’s never touched a drink, throwing the latter’s faults into relief while reducing the pleasurable contortions of the former to hopeless, ludicrous camp.

Despite the cutesy term-paper pun of the title, the territory seems new for Egoyan. After all, Martin-and-Lewis teams never crop up in his work, nor do mobsters, singing telethons, and people having sex and liking it. But, of course, none of this is supposed to be enjoyed for its own sake. The M & L impostors—straight man Vince Collins (Colin Firth) and manic funnyman Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon)—have a big ugly secret that ruined their partnership, namely the reason Maureen O’Flaherty (Rachel Blanchard) wound up dead in their hotel bathroom. This means that every bit of fun is impossible to trust, because you know the hammer of shame will crash down the moment you relax and start liking something. It also means that the detective plot that drives the narrative—with celebrity journo K. O’Connor (Alison Lohman) trying to find the truth 20 years later—is going to be the usual past-strangling-the-present antics of Egoyan legend.

So it comes to pass that O’Connor is not the obvious truth-teller of American genre heroics; her feet are made of clay, and when she by chance meets Morris on a plane and winds up in bed with him while stalking him for an interview, it’s obvious that she’s far from an easy point of identification. But that makes her even with Morris and Collins, who are clearly the society-of-the-spectacle straw men so beloved of Canadian film theorists; the telethon that crescendos with the discovery of the body is a classic (if obvious) displacement of image and reality. O’Connor lies, the boys lie, the mobsters who run the boys’ lives lie—and, most crucially, their loyal servant lies, to the point that his pathetic clinging to his job pushes him to do a terrible thing. Active people tend to have agendas, from Morris’s venal publishers to anyone even remotely connected to Morris and Collins, meaning that actions must be considered carefully---—if at all.

The problem is that it becomes impossible to see where any good might come out of action. It’s not that we’re distanced to the point that we can make our own decisions on the outcome; all we see is the characters’ screwing up, over and over again, until any forward motion seems at best futile and at worst destructive. The only person the director can truly sympathize with in the movie is the corpse- not the young woman in the flashbacks (who does her own terrible thing), but the tree that has grown up around her scattered ashes. Living people have self-interest, which means they sin; a dead person is incapable of action, making them sweet and virtuous. The film forms the Canadian passive yin to the American aggressive yang—where the rowdies to the south do without thinking, Egoyan and many of his countrymen lie quietly on the ground and wait for the end. Both are trying to pre-empt the complexity of the problem; it’s really just a matter of approach.

Unfortunately, both approaches are resolutely incompatible, making Egoyan’s attempt to mate them astoundingly ill-advised. Followers of the director note that he tends to chill his aesthetics and mute the drama, which, however irritating to us sensualists, at least makes sense with his quasi-Brechtian program. Dropping him in the middle of the shag-carpet Seventies (and flashing back to the lounge-ready Fifties) doesn’t, because the whole point of the excessive-flashback genre is to acknowledge the seduction of the hedonist lifestyle before it all goes horribly wrong. And while there’s plenty of Cecil B. DeMille calculation in its rise-and-fall structure, the genre at least acknowledges the pleasures as well as the pains of burning the candle at both ends. But as Egoyan’s personal anhedonia makes Woody Allen look like Ted Nugent, he can neither commit to this kind of movie nor admit to himself that he’s completely in over his head. The results are predictably spectacular. Egoyan tries to evoke the period but can’t enjoy the surfaces enough to get on with it: his approach is so uncertain, so unfamiliar, that it looks less like the age of excess than a costume party thrown by a very timid office. The minute a black man with a huge, phony afro shows up, you can’t keep yourself from laughing: Egoyan is so isolated from this kind of filmic pleasure that he can’t muster anything more convincing than papier-mâché. Of course, when he tries to backtrack by sneaking in his old cast buddies, it doesn’t work either, as when David Hemblen’s rigid cameo provokes even bigger laughs—lost amongst the polyester, they dry up and blow away. And when he tries do both at once, the effect is jaw-dropping—such as the fairy-tale play for sick children that features a sultry blonde in an Alice costume singing the Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.” Subtext, people! Cue the giant Cheshire Cat!

As it turns out, Stursberg is now out of a job and things may return to where Egoyan can do as he pleases. There may be no more detours into unfamiliar territory, no more excursions into realms that disturb him and strike him aesthetically dumb. This is too bad. For one thing, Where the Truth Lies is a magnificent freak, a one-of-a-kind smash-up between an opposing force and an immovable object. For another, the constant contact with surface pleasure might force him to rethink the nihilism that masquerades as social conscience—it might lead him out of his belief that life itself is a crime and a sin, and get him to affirm some part of life instead of eviscerating it wholesale. He may need another country to do it, but the trip might be worth it—as much for his sake as for ours.