The mistaken identity trope is a popular one in film. The history of cinema is filled with them — While You Were Sleeping, Mrs. Doubtfire, Date Night, The Talented Mr. Ripley, etc. People really get a kick out of the natural tension that occurs when one character pretends to be someone else. Oh, how fun it is to watch them blunder through awkward encounters and close calls! Director Michael Maren capitalizes on this particular gaffe in his latest film, A Little White Lie, and while the cast of the movie feels extremely promising, the story eventually loses sight of its simple premise, turning into a convoluted mess by the time the credits roll.
Based on the book Shriver by Chris Belden, Maren’s film adaptation stars the talented Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road, The Shape of Water) as Shriver, a down-on-his-luck divorcé who, due to having the same name as a famous reclusive author, accidentally gets invited to attend a college literary festival to talk about his bestselling book. In real life, any sane person would immediately contact the college in question and inform them that they are most definitely not the Shriver the college is looking for, but if Shannon’s character did that, then you wouldn’t be reading this review. Instead, with the help of his friend, the false Shriver accepts the school’s invitation to attend, much to the delight of one of the English department’s talented but insecure professors, Simone Cleary (Kate Hudson).
Any time you put Kate Hudson in a movie with a male lead and a quirky plot, you kind of expect a romantic comedy. And at the movie’s start, it would seem that Shriver and Simone are well on their way to falling in love, revealing their secrets, fighting, and then making up in one tension filled, fevered dash through an airport just before one of them boards a plane to fly home. The two even have an awkward first encounter at an airport (!!!) bar where a nervous Shriver contemplates backing out of the whole festival until he — gasp! — sees Simone and decides, maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea after all. And while there is definitely some romantic tension that builds between the two as the film progresses, their chemistry with one another feels stunted and unrealistic until it eventually gets sidelined for a much stranger tangent that catapults the film from “mediocre rom-com” into “quasi-meta meaning-of-life” territory.
Anyone who has attended a small, liberal arts college knows just how seriously the English department can get about their festivals and their writing credentials. The fictional college of Acheron University is not any different. The English professors check all the cliché college professor boxes (Don Johnson nails his part as the boozy silver fox who definitely has a bad habit of sleeping with his students), and the drama over Shriver’s magnum opus is a perfect representation of author worship à la David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo or basically any other White Male Author who has written a honkin’ long book that the literary world has gone gaga over at some point in time. There are also some clever nods to the intricacies of the writing circuit (anyone who spots Literary Hub’s much-coveted Joan Didion tote bag gets major lit world street cred) that makes it pretty obvious that the writers and producers of this film spent their fair share of time haunting literary Twitter in order to get the campus vibes just right. Still, for all the film’s attention to detail, the movie’s actual story is, ironically, lacking.
Somewhere throughout the film’s 100 minutes, Shriver eventually begins to wonder if maybe he actually is the real Shriver who wrote the book and that he just…kind of forgot about it. How someone could forget such a massive accomplishment and not have suffered some kind of life-altering medical emergency, is beyond me, but that does seem to be the case here. At this point in the movie, the plot starts to try and tackle all kinds of artsy, literary problems like imposter syndrome (haha get it?!) and taking credit for one’s work in the face of a changing cultural climate. Realistically, these have the potential to be interesting things to explore on a deeper level, but there’s simply not enough time or nuance for A Little White Lie to really delve into its own subject matter. While the film isn’t the worst thing you’ll see all year, it is hardly the quirky romantic comedy (dramedy?) that you would expect (and also want) from a cast as talented as this one.
Photo courtesy of Saban Films
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