A Life Through Film #049: Liar Liar
Jim Carrey wanted a hard pivot away from farces. The truth is he needed to ease everyone into it first.
Release Date: 3/21/1997
Weeks at Number One: 3
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!
The original plan could have killed Jim Carrey’s career before the year 2000.
Initially, the biggest comedy star in the world was supposed to go straight from the controversial release of The Cable Guy in the early summer of 1996 to production of a little movie called The Truman Show. You may have heard of it.
This new film would eschew Carrey’s comedy style almost entirely for something far more serious, existential, and dramatic. There would be nothing like the Ace Ventura shtick that had made Carrey one of the most successful actors of the ‘90s; instead, The Truman Show would be a bittersweet commentary on a life defined by constant control and surveillance.
I won’t get too into it now because The Truman Show will eventually become the subject of its own column in this series, but I think that it’s one of the most brilliant movies of that decade. I also think that if everything had gone according to schedule, the double feature of it and The Cable Guy would have turned every one of Jim Carrey’s dedicated fans against him permanently.
I’ve already written 4000 words explaining the problems The Cable Guy had connecting with audiences (despite how good it is), but Carrey himself basically nailed it when he expressed his frustrations to the Cleveland Inquirer in 1997:
The whole time I’m going [to the studio], “Tell ‘em it’s dark! It is dark! Don’t apologize for it.” So people showed up expecting fluff and got the creature under the bed.
If general audiences had rejected The Cable Guy for being too strange and dark, then went to see The Truman Show less than a year later, they would have written Carrey off entirely. A man famous for making silly faces and jokes about talking out of his butt was dead set on drama and societal commentary; what the hell was he thinking? Was this the real Jim Carrey all along? Or was his head swollen so mightily with success that he thought he could totally abandon the type of work that had made him famous in the first place? It doesn’t even matter that the movies were good. Playing with audience expectations like that can be commercially dangerous.
Thankfully for the actor, his plans for the summer of 1996 shifted due to forces outside his control. The script for The Truman Show wasn’t ready, meaning Carrey, who had a pathological need to keep busy during this period, had no new project. This pissed the star off mightily, not helped by his continued frustrations at the studio bumbling the marketing for The Cable Guy. In truth, while Carrey was ready to explore new types of performances, perhaps due to the misery of making that Ace Ventura sequel, the movies he wanted to make take more production effort than something like Dumb and Dumber [3/5]. He couldn’t just easily hop from project to project anymore.
Maybe it was this irritation that caused him to accept a stopgap role that, on its surface, was far more similar to the characters that had made him famous in 1994. The part called for the zany Carrey antics that audiences had loved him for in The Mask [3.5/5], as well as an even higher degree of physical acting to boot. But there was something deeper in the script as well.
Here was a story about family, love, and professional sacrifices. Hidden beneath the surface of this wacky comedy was some of the emotional depth that Carrey had wanted to explore since the end of 1995, now much more palatable for a general audience. Finally, the fans could see that Carrey was more than his wild antics, even as went above and beyond with them one more time.
Liar Liar, the tale of a mendacious lawyer magically forced by the birthday wish of his son to tell the truth for 24 hours, has the outward appearance of Carrey’s famous 1994 output. The star rants, raves, and contorts his face in ways that shouldn’t be possible, his buffoonish actions funny both because of their absurdity and the way normal characters around him are made uncomfortable by them. If that’s the kind of Jim Carrey you love, Liar Liar is the movie for you (if somehow you’ve missed it over the past 30 or so years).
So why did the actor choose to sign onto the project, despite his continued efforts to otherwise distance himself from the comedy stylings that had made him famous?
The roots of the project start with screenwriting team Paul Guay and Stephen Mazur in the early ‘90s. Guay has described himself in interviews as someone who just can’t believe it when someone lies to his face, which makes me wonder how he’s had a successful career in Hollywood at all (nyuck nyuck nyuck). Fascinated by the reasons people use to decide whether to lie or tell the truth, Guay wrote down a film idea on a napkin and presented it to Mazur: what if someone who lived life as a frequent liar suddenly was forced to tell the truth?
This strikes me as a solid basis for a comedy, yet the way the writers describe their pitch meetings for it in the ensuing years sounds harrowing. Producers were so averse to the project that Guay and Mazur’s manager warned them that continuing to pitch Liar Liar was damaging their careers. Maybe these showbiz power players heard a story about a man whose personal life was ruined by his lying nature and felt it was too close to home (again, nyuck nyuck nyuck).
Granted, Guay and Mazur weren’t going to production studios with a fully formed Jim Carrey comedy in their pocket. The early iterations of Liar Liar were about a kid who can’t fib after promising his grandma he wouldn’t anymore, but after writing the 1993 Little Rascals adaptation, they decided to change it to an adult protagonist in order to not get pegged as solely kids movie writers.
Even then though, the premise of Liar Liar remained vague and unformed. Guay and Mazur couldn’t decide what occupation protagonist Fletcher Reede should have, so they kept it vague while pitching; Carrey could have ended up being a real estate agent, a politician, or a boxing promoter. That lack of conceptual focus couldn’t have helped the story’s chances in those pitch rooms, and Guay admits that they often threw the Liar Liar idea in as an answer to the age old pitching room question “What else do you got for us?”
By the time the screenwriters finally settled on Reede being a lawyer, they were too busy with Little Rascals to continue the humiliation ritual of attempting to convince producers to take a chance on Liar Liar. The script fell to the backburner until sometime in 1995 when Guay and Mazur found themselves across from David Friendly at Imagine Entertainment.1 Imagine was founded by director Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer, two power players in Hollywood who’ve been in this column a couple of times already for movies like The Nutty Professor and Ransom. Their commitment to a project was highly valuable, and Friendly reported directly to them.
Friendly told Guay and Mazur that Grazer was interested in a movie about a lawyer, possibly influenced by the media attention towards the OJ Simpson trial. We’ve watched a few legal thrillers already for this column, all likely influenced by the hubbub around the OJ case at least in part, but that’s not what Guay and Mazur could offer. Instead, their talents skewed comedic and heartfelt, providing a new angle on legal trials that wasn’t being explored at that time. Plus, Mazur had once worked as a prosecutor for Los Angeles County, lending him an air of professional respectability even as he tried to make a silly comedy.2
The screenwriters made their case for Liar Liar, and Friendly passed it up the chain to Grazer within the hour. After one last appeal to the enthusiastic producer, Guay and Mazur won the day. They sold Liar Liar on a two sentence pitch to the right people.
The screenwriters’ first picks for the role of Fletcher Reede were Tom Hanks and Steve Martin, but both passed. Hugh Grant was seriously interested, but the Brit had to pull out due to his own legal and publicity issues following the Divine Brown scandal. Eventually, it was Grazer who was able to pass the script for Liar Liar to Jim Carrey, who agreed to the role and kicked production into overdrive. What drew the comedy star to this project in particular?
Part of it was that gap in his schedule. Carrey had been planning on using the summer of 1996 to film The Truman Show, but the script he’d been promised was still in development. The actor hadn’t stopped working in years; he was basically always either filming a movie or promoting it. Taking an idle summer to relax didn’t interest him, even as his new, very public relationship with Dumb and Dumber costar Lauren Holly continued to heat up.
Carrey had another problem though. In June 1996, a month before shooting started on Liar Liar, The Cable Guy released into theaters to an icy reception from both critics (expected) and fans (unprecedented). The actor was frustrated by the process of making the movie both before and after release, mostly due to the studio forcing edits to the darker elements of the story and marketing the film as a screwball buddy comedy. I don’t specifically know when Carrey signed on to star in Liar Liar, but if it was basically any point in early ‘96, his frustrations with perception of The Cable Guy would have been front of mind.
The actor’s rejection of his own comedic stylings didn’t come out of nowhere. Filming his contractually obliged Ace Ventura sequel had been a low point for him professionally. His intense work ethic pushed him ever forward, so stopping to regress to something he had already done wasn’t just annoying to Carrey, it was psychologically damaging. This antipathy would lead to a career rejection of sequels for decades, and in the short term forced him into projects that totally shifted public perception of him. Step one of that had been The Cable Guy, step two would be The Truman Show.
Why sign onto a silly comedy like Liar Liar, then? Another $20 million payday was probably enticing, as was the chance to reunite with Tom Shadyac, director of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (as well as The Nutty Professor). But Carrey saw potential in the story’s larger themes. Liar Liar isn’t just about a guy who can’t tell a lie. It’s about that guy discovering the truth in the absence of his own dishonesty: love and family are worth protecting over the greedy interests that work to tear them apart.
That’s an obvious message, far less layered than even what The Cable Guy had to say about society’s complicated relationship to television. But it’s more heart and morality than anything you’d see in Ace Ventura or Dumb and Dumber, so Carrey was right to consider it a storytelling step up for his career. Not too far a step like The Cable Guy, but just a nudge forward to convince general audiences that he was more than just his wild comedy.
Maybe that’s why Carrey went for it so hard here. I’ve watched basically his whole career up to this point, and quite a good amount of his work after 1997 as well, and I can confidently say I’ve never seen this guy act so outlandishly in any other comedy role.
It takes a bit to get there in the movie though, and it leads to an opening stretch that, while not bad, is necessarily a bit boring. Liar Liar doesn’t need to spend 20 minutes establishing that Reede is a professionally successful yet dishonest lawyer who struggles to balance his work life with his relationships to his son and ex-wife (Maura Tierney, last seen in this column with a minor role in Primal Fear), but it does anyway.
This early version of Reede is funny, but as a smarmy asshole that isn’t too dissimilar from the characters Vince Vaughn would play in the 2000s to great success. Carrey’s good at it, but not so great that it couldn’t have been Steve Martin up to the point where the main gimmick of Liar Liar kicks in.
The mechanics of how Fletcher Reede loses his ability to lie aren’t important. I’ve found too many clickbait articles trying to interrogate the presence of magic in Liar Liar and break down the mechanics of a child’s birthday wish. Guay and Mazur insist that it’s just a storytelling device that isn’t meant to be explored too deeply, and I’m on the same page. It doesn’t matter how Reede’s son’s oddly specific wish comes true, because the real attraction is what happens once it does.
Jim Carrey’s performance in Liar Liar is that of a man possessed. That’s usually a weak idiom, but specifically I was reminded while watching Carrey bounce off the walls and fight his own body of Bruce Campbell’s unbelievably physical acting in horror-comedy Evil Dead II [3.5/5]. His character is literally possessed by a demon in that film, so he has an excuse. Carrey’s main struggle as Reede is against himself, so it isn’t dissimilar, but you’d think there’s an actual monster taking control of Carrey’s body during certain moments.
The sheer abandon with which Carrey treats his body in an effort to get a laugh is on the same level as Jackie Chan at his most daring. As Reede, the actor slams himself into walls, collapses like a sack of bricks, punches and slaps his own face repeatedly, and generally acts as a human tornado. All the while, Carrey’s face twists and distorts in discomfort as though an invisible pair of hands is roughly forcing him to make the mouth motions necessary to tell the truth.
When the screenwriters initially considered Steve Martin for the role, I imagine they were thinking of his famous scene dealing with rental car customer service from Planes, Trains, and Automobiles [3.5/5]. That kind of emotional intensity is along the lines of what Carrey ends up doing with the role of Fletcher Reede, but cranked up far higher than Martin, Hanks, Grant, or any other actor that I can think of could have taken it. The result may be Carrey’s funniest performance to this point in his career.
It’s not just physical comedy either. Carrey ad libbed most of his dialogue, but it’s to his credit as a comedian that it never felt like aimless stumbling to a half-baked punchline. The movie’s central premise calls on him to blurt out the first thing that comes to his mind, no matter how crass or antisocial. The actor is more than up to figuring out what that is once Shadyac yells action. It’s a performance filled with a number of iconic Carrey lines, including some extremely sage legal advice that you may have heard.
The actor attacks the comedic elements of Liar Liar so vigorously that you may think that Carrey would have no energy left for his more sensitive moments alongside the young actor who plays his son. But though the movie doesn’t have too many of those scenes, he also manages to convincingly play an empathetic human being as well.
There’s a moment near the end after Reede wins a massive divorce settlement for his client (a delightfully malicious Jennifer Tilly) despite his curse of truthfulness. His dramatic realization that the victory doesn’t matter since it will only prolong the suffering of his client’s children isn’t quite as dramatic a level as what he’ll reach in The Truman Show, but it’s closer than you might think.
Later, a climactic declaration of his love for his son isn’t quite a tear jerker, but it’s impressive for the man who to this point was known for blowing raspberries and kissing monkeys on the mouth as a bit. Liar Liar isn’t a particularly deep movie, but it has just enough emotional complexity to it for audiences to safely consider Carrey as more than a clown. Perhaps he was…a sad clown all along.
I know I’m making a big deal about what is essentially a basic character arc, but you have to keep in mind that this was a big deal for Jim Carrey. In his earlier work, characters like Ace Ventura or Lloyd Christmas don’t evolve so much as they bring their existing shtick to different scenarios and contexts. As layered as Carrey’s performance as the titular cable guy was, he’s essentially playing the same version of the guy from beginning to end. You could argue that this is the first time that the actor has ever starred in a movie where he had a narrative arc: he’s a bad dad and a constant liar, he’s forced to be truthful, he learns to be a good dad, the end.
If you think that’s easy to get across comically or dramatically, may I direct your attention to Beverly Hills Ninja? In comedies, especially ones filled with this kind of slapstick, character development is often the first thing cut out in the editing bay. Carrey’s dual performance as both jester and thespian (as it were) are both strong enough to justify giving Liar Liar enough heart to almost match its goofiness.
Like in The Cable Guy, every other actor gives Carrey all the space in the world to dominate the frame, so there aren’t any performances as standout as his. The closest to it would probably be young Justin Cooper, who plays Reede’s young son Max. Cooper is cute, but not so precocious that you couldn’t believe that his earnestness triggered some powerful birthday magic. He’s especially good at conveying Max’s repeated disappointment in his dad’s lies, such as when Reede tells him that they’re going to watch wrestling and instead drags the young boy back to the office to get some work done.3
Maura Tierney is never given anything to do as Audrey Reede, but I like the bickering chemistry between her and Carrey early on. She’s never as funny as her ex-husband, but her digs at him are more personal and do a good job doubling as expository characterization. Cary Elwes’s role as her new boyfriend Jerry is basically an extended cameo, but his blandly friendly demeanor is a perfect foil to Reede’s weaponized snark.
You’re better off remembering Liar Liar as a handful of truly excellent scenes, not a fully cohesive, satisfying comedic narrative. The connective tissue that gets Reede from one location to the next isn’t really all that important. It’s what Carrey does with the character once he’s in his car, or the courtroom, or a crowded board meeting that you won’t forget once the blooper-filled credits roll.
The whole experience of Liar Liar is, frankly speaking, a little lean. There’s a basic concept, a bunch of jokes about that concept, and a decently done emotional resolution all done in under 85 minutes. This brevity does make the movie quite rewatchable, but perhaps a bit slight if you only watch it once.
Liar Liar is a bit difficult to write about, because it’s just a well done conceptual comedy anchored by one of the most insane performances I’ve ever seen from a human being. Nothing about it is really all that bad except maybe some occasional sexism, but besides Carrey’s otherworldly commitment to physical comedy, nothing else about it really jumps out as noteworthy. As the best of the actor’s broad comedies (that I’ve seen anyway), Liar Liar is worth watching. Just don’t expect it to be as thoughtful as his work immediately preceding and following it.
After a career defined to this point by critical dogpiles, Carrey finally had a hit with the reviewers with this one. Liar Liar holds a highly respectable 83% on Rotten Tomatoes, to this point in his career the highest aggregate score he’d received on the platform. Roger Ebert gave the actor a rare positive review, scoring Liar Liar 3 out 4 stars and praising the intense mania of Carrey’s performance. Janet Maslin at The New York Times applauded Carrey for uplifting a basic premise with his incredible energy, while Russell Smith for The Austin Chronicle was a bit more reserved in his praise, saying that the movie was “too formulaic and too much a one-man vehicle to rate as a true masterpiece.”
Carrey had won the critics back for the first time since The Mask, but it was the audience response that truly proved that he had moved past The Cable Guy. Powered by a strong marketing campaign that promised its star was back to his old silly ways, Liar Liar grossed an unheard of $31 million its opening weekend, breaking a record for highest grossing March opening of all time. That Sunday, Carrey went to the Oscars to present an award and was able to humblebrag to all of Hollywood. He was their comedy king. Bow down and laugh.
Liar Liar stayed at the top of the charts for two more weeks after its debut. It was never in close competition with any other new movies, and even when it was supplanted by next week’s movie, it was only by a margin of less than $2 million. That leanness that I talked about may have been one of the movie’s strengths in theaters. The short runtime made it easy to justify going back and seeing it again, especially since Carrey does so much in his performance that it’s impossible to catch all his little mannerisms and jokes the first time around.
The movie was a runaway success. You could find Liar Liar in theaters until that October in many places, and by the time it finally left just before the holidays, the movie had a final domestic gross of $181 million. That’s good enough for 4th overall on the 1997 list of highest grossing movies, far and away the highest ranking comedy on that chart. Another $121 million from the international release was practically the cherry on top. Jim Carrey had proven that he was still funny AND that he could portray a sympathetic character to the tune of $300 million globally. Not bad for some last minute summer work.
Carrey kept busy immediately following the filming of Liar Liar. He got married to Lauren Holly in September of ‘96, finally got to go film The Truman Show (again, more on that in a future column), then had the greatest March weekend any actor could ever ask for before getting divorced from Holly a few months later. Maybe the part in Liar Liar where his character gets back together with his ex-wife after fixing his personal issues gave him false confidence in his own ability to make a marriage work this time around. Ah well.
The professional metamorphosis that Carrey had decided to undertake back in South Carolina while filming When Nature Calls was finally gaining steam. Audiences knew that he could be funny, but they were also willing to take small steps towards his dramatic capabilities as well. In the coming years, Carrey would alternate between these two modes, silly and serious, occasionally within the same calendar year, to great effect.
Eventually, his serious work would be scorned as the folly of a hubristic comedian, but until then we have some of my favorite movies of all time to get to. Thanks to Liar Liar, we’ll be talking about Jim Carrey again in this column, and for some damn good movies too.
Rating: 3.5/5
What Else Was In Theaters?
Liar Liar debuted the same weekend as the musical biopic Selena. J Lo’s performance as the late tejano star made her a star, even if the movie only peaked at second place before going on to make $35 million in theaters. Fuck Howard Stern! Selena is a 4/5.
In the third week of Liar Liar supremacy, audiences were treated to Val Kilmer’s The Saint. This spy thriller was what the actor chose to do instead of returning as Batman, and it actually made a lot of money ($160 million globally) for a movie that peaked in second place and that no one remembers anymore. It sure is a film that exists. 2.5/5
That same week saw the end of Jean-Claude Van Damme as a mainstream concern. Double Team, his dreadful action team up with NBA star Dennis Rodman, was a major commercial and critical bomb from the word go. Despite once being one of the biggest action stars in the world, after this dud only grossed $11 million, the Muscles from Brussels was strictly a washed up straight-to-video star. It sucks big time. 1.5/5
Next Week: Summer is here, so I think it’s time we camp. The insanity of Anaconda slithers its way into the column next Friday!
See you then!
-Will
What an absolutely whimsical confluence of name and company
Two things. One: insane that they didn’t go straight to Reede being a lawyer based on Mazur’s past career. Two: this makes two Jim Carrey movies in a row written by once or current prosecutors for LA County. Surely no other actor has that stat, right?
Okay, quick wrestling diatribe here. Reede specifically mentions taking Max to go see Ravishing Rick Rude and Macho Man Randy Savage at that show. Savage was an active wrestler in WCW at the time of Carrey recording that scene in 1996, but Rude had retired from the company and the ring in general due to injury in 1994. In fact, Macho Man wasn’t even in WCW when Rude retired! The Ravishing One would eventually return to WCW as an onscreen manager, but only in late 1997, after brief stints in ECW and the WWF beforehand. Gee, I sure hope someone got fired for that blunder.