The Good Liar is a movie starring Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren play characters that meet online under the auspices of looking for companionship, but he is actually a relentless scammer who has just found his latest mark. Her grandson is suspicious, and she seems very fond of him. Will he succeed?
When movies are marketed to mature audiences, the actual product is usually insulting to their intelligence. I adore Helen Mirren, but she gets jobs in dreadful movies that never quite meet her level of excellence. After The Leisure Seeker, I was a little hesitant to see any of her movies in the theater, but after regretting missing Anna on the big screen, I decided to ignore the negative reviews for The Good Liar during its second week at theaters mainly because it was showing in a local neighborhood theater.
The Good Liar was better than I expected and affably entertaining, but still extremely predictable if you watch a lot of movies as I do or if you are familiar with McKellen’s past work. To be fair, because I am also a fan of Stephen King’s work, I may have overshot my expectations slightly, but considering how things turned out in the film, I think that my excess may be forgiven. Apparently the film is an adaptation of a Nicholas Searle book, which I did not know before watching the movie, and I do not think that I will read it, but I am not necessarily ruling it out. I think that my main issues are with the story, which I will discuss later after the spoiler warning, so I may get curious to see if the problems lie in the source material or the film.
The Good Liar’s appeal mainly lies with its cast. It is fun to see McKellen laying it on thick as an adorable old man then switch to his true, craven self. His best sequence rivals a scene out of House of Cards in cleverness and choreography. One woman was laughing and loving the opening credits. Because Mirren has to play the straight woman, but has an irrepressible intelligence and sauciness, there is never a moment when you hate her for being clueless because she plays the levels of her character very well. Occasionally her wit and bonhomie seem at conflict with one another so Mirren has a tricky juggling act. Russell Tovey, whom I loved in the United Kingdom’s version of the television series Being Human balances the two out. His suspicion acts like parents’ disapproval of a teenager’s first love-it only pulls them closer together whereas if he was less vocal, a viewer could surmise that she may figure out. McKellen’s character also has a guy in his corner, but if there was a weak spot in the film, it is the idea that anyone who knows him well would remain unscathed and stay in his corner for long without having eyes in the back of his head. There has to be a lot of suspension of disbelief that he could make a friendly, long standing work colleague.
Visually The Good Liar is very appealing and glossy in the way that it shoots London, the surrounding suburbs from overhead like a maze then Berlin, particularly the remnants of the Berlin Wall. It is a striking contrast if you have seen films such as Never Look Away, Atomic Blonde and the remake of Suspiria. It definitely is trying to call on the “power of place,” which Tovey’s character references in a conversation about his work. I do not necessarily think that it succeeded until maybe the final scene because when we see or hear things referenced that has significance to the characters, but not yet revealed to the viewer, it does create a vague doubt in the viewer that maybe the viewer missed something. I did enjoy how the movie explicitly referenced films in the movie, but it also felt as if there were implicit references to other movies rather than history in spite of the importance of historians and remembering the past as themes visited throughout the film. I have no idea why 2009 was so pivotal to the plot. Is there significance to that year which I am unaware of?
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I immediately thought it was odd that two older people would want to see a Quentin Tarantino film, Inglorious Basterds, which tipped me off that this movie may actually be a vengeance movie, not a caper movie, and I suspected from the beginning that Mirren’s character had her own scam going though I did not know that Tovey was in on it. I thought that McKellen’s character was a Nazi, but when we first meet him, he seems to hate Germans because they were Nazis. The teenage version of his character fails to sell it. The sequence seems rushed as if he suddenly became evil that day. Unfortunately with a film like Parasite currently in theaters, viewers of both films painfully know what is missing in these flashbacks—credibility. There needed to be more of a buildup to his menace. It seemed impulsive, and if he was a tutor for a long time, that means he was not obviously sinister, which this teen seemed to be. He even clenches his fist. Eye roll. No one would hire him.
We discover that Mirren’s character knew him as a child, and she is the daughter of a wealthy man who is vital to the war, i.e. a Nazi, but because of one late game decision, maybe changing his mind and not as bad as the other Nazis…welcome to the resistance? Since this movie is more concerned about venality rooted in opportunism rather than politics and takes great pains to only have one real Nazi, why bother to even set it in this specific historical period and location since the story is so clearly uncomfortable with the possibility that she was originally more of a Nazi than our villain? That story would have been textured and nuanced making them both villains for different reasons.
Instead the story kind of punks out by clearly indicating that she is not a Nazi because she has black people in the family and is a historian who clearly deplores them. I’m not calling her character a Nazi because she is not, but just because you have black people in your family does not mean that you are not racist. It can often mean the opposite. It was a weird filmmaking choice to show her black family, but it seemed as if she was closer with Tovey than them. I am uncertain whether anyone in her family has names. The chemistry with her family, i.e. the acting, sells it because otherwise it would feel like tokenism, not substantive.
The Good Liar could have been a better story if it was more of a parallel story simultaneously showing McKellen and Mirren’s characters’ shenanigans behind the scenes to ensnare the other. I was really curious how a woman like her heals enough to survive, thrive then avenge. McKellen was magnificent to watch, but I feel as if we are missing half the story. I was imagining this film almost as an unofficial sequel to A Woman In Berlin except it would be a teenage girl in Berlin. I also wonder if audiences are familiar with what happened when the Soviets invaded to understand the plight of her character.
I enjoyed The Good Liar, but there is tremendous room for improvement. It would not hurt for someone to remake it, set it in a different era and location and really explore both characters’ shadow selves as they superficially connect. I never bought that she was a sucker, but the minute that she flat out rejected the implication of sexual advances, his reptilian brain should have kicked in. Where is that easily enraged boy? They need to do a better job of balancing the past with the present.
