Mark Reviews Movies: A LITTLE WHITE LIE

A Little White Lie, Saban Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 1, 2023

It's easy enough to figure out where the story of A Little White Lie is heading, and that makes the movie's uncertain aim and tone frustrating. Writer/director Michael Maren has a very specific tale to tell here, but by the time the movie gets around to even suggesting that central idea in a clear way, this story has too many ancillary wheels spinning for it to focus on the thing that set all of it in motion.

The result is a movie, based on Chris Belden's novel Shriver, that begins as a comedy about deception but that really wants to become an intimate study of what deception can do a person. Some of this is admittedly funny and niche, in the way Maren delves into the insulated world of literary types bolstering their egos at a festival designed exclusively to bolster egos, but ultimately, little of that world or humor is the actual point here.

As for the festival in question, it's run by the English department of a university, overseen by the faculty and staff. The festival's future is in question, and Simone Cleary (Kate Hudson), a professor and aspiring author, has a plan to save it. She just needs a big-name guest of some renown to give the festival's publicity a boost. Simone has the perfect someone in mind.

That would be the author of a controversial novel from 20 years ago, which still has fans and possesses some notability on account of its surreal subject matter and the fact that its author went into seclusion after its writing. Nobody knows what the man looks like, and nobody actually knows where he lives. Simone sends out a lot of letters to various people with the same initials and surname as the author, and one returns to her with a handwritten response, accepting the invitation to attend as a guest of honor at the fest.

We quickly learn that man, known only as Shriver and played by Michael Shannon, is no writer. He's the superintendent of a run-down apartment building. Shriver shows the odd letter to a friend (played by Mark Boone Junior), who writes the acceptance note as a gag. With a free trip and hotel-stay all set, Shriver decides to fly out to the university for reasons that don't make much sense, unless one starts to think that there might be more to the guy being confronted by a harsh version of himself in his mind.

There is a lot more to that running device, but we'll leave it there. After having second thoughts about his plan, Shriver meets Simone by chance at the airport bar, and after seeing the disappointment on her face, he decides to go forward with the ruse (There's a little confusion about whether or not Simone is aware of his fakery, an idea that might have sold Shriver's deception a bit more, but she's not, apparently).

This is a fine setup for some pointed satire about literary types and how easily we accept what we want to believe, no matter how unlikely it may seem. In the former category, there's T. (Don Johnson), a professor and wannabe poet who freely quotes his favorites and rides a horse around town because he drinks too much to have driver's license, and Blythe (Aja Naomi King), a feminist writer who takes Shriver to task for the content of his novel but starts to see there might be more to the person who wrote it. That T. exists mostly to explain more about Simone's character and past, while Blythe becomes an actual plot device when she goes missing, might give one a sense about how much distraction from and deflection of promising material is happening here.

The whole movie feels unfortunately muted, especially considering the stakes and juggling of Shriver trying to keep up his deception, as well as the sort of free-for-all atmosphere of the festival, its constant maintenance of egos, and its after-hours partying. Part of that, through no fault of his own, comes from Shannon's performance, because the actor is too busy playing a convincingly conflicted—and not just on account of the lie—man, instead of worrying about whether or not the business surrounding his character is funny. To be clear, that's the right decision on Shannon's part, because so much of this character is separate from this scenario and what we're told of him from the start.

As a director and screenwriter, Maren simply doesn't balance the shenanigans of the deception plot, in addition to the cutting humor of these side players, with the movie's real purpose, which is to examine Shriver's past and internal life—basically, the truth beneath the lie. As that truth gets closer and closer to the surface, though, A Little White Lie doubles down on its plot mechanics, with a police detective (played by Jimmi Simpson) looking into the missing writer and Zach Braff playing someone who also claims to be Shriver. Just when the story and the character should be coming into sharper focus, the movie blurs its intentions, resulting in an anticlimax of a finale just when things start to get interesting.

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