Lies and Alibis
Lies and Alibis is one of the smartest, funniest underhanded caper type films I’ve seen. The screenplay is excellent, written by Noah Hawley (rewrites by Collin Friesen), the direction is crisp by Kurt Mattila and Matt Checkowski, the score by Alexandre Desplat is pitch perfect. Steve Coogan interviews Rebecca Romijn for his alibi service, in which he covers for cheating spouses. The plot thickens quickly into a chess game of many intriguing dimensions. The dialogue is intelligent and fast, the plot design endlessly amusing, the subject matter absurd, and I found this movie hysterical. I am reminded of Gross Point Blank (Cusack, Minnie Driver, Dan Aykroyd), a film I loved, and the Whole Nine Yards with Bruce Willis, Amanda Peete, Matthew Perry, Roseanne Arquette (who had the awful accent), another smart and fun black comedy.
This is one of my favorite movies of 2006 and I never saw it get out of the gate. I think the infidelity subject is not so fun for daters or divorced viewers who will hate it unless they love black humor, but those who seek humor in all forms cannot pass this one up. There are echoes of Intolerable Cruelty here as well, another Coen brothers mini master work, but this film is breezier, less heavy handed, less surreal, and I think funnier.
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