‘Should have garnered the actor an Oscar’: why Liar Liar is my feelgood movie

3 hours ago 11

To be completely honest, whenever anybody asks what my favorite movies are, my list has some typical standbys: Goodfellas and It’s a Wonderful Life among them. The holiday classic National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is another. But there’s one feelgood fave on my list that always surprises people: Jim Carrey’s 1997 blockbuster Liar Liar.

The movie (for the lack of a better word) lies on the bedrock of a simple premise: a lawyer and doting father is physically unable to tell an untruth due to a birthday wish. In the hands of a less competent creative team and cast, Liar Liar would have been yet another forgettable piece of 90s comedy junk; destined for the bottom of a discount VHS bin, forgotten as the years trudged on. But largely thanks to an unbelievable performance courtesy of Carrey, who was working with a smart and peppy script, the film thusly ascends into rarefied air.

The bellylaugh-o-meter breaks its springs on a regular basis throughout its brisk 86-minute runtime. In fact, it’s on par, or even surpassing, fellow comedy powerhouses such as Airplane! and The Naked Gun when it comes to the sheer volume of gags, setpieces and jokes. Tom Shadyac, the director, who previously directed Carrey in his 1993 breakout Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, wisely unleashes Carrey, who spins out and around the scenery like the Tasmanian Devil, remarkably combining such a manic and energetic performance with one grounded in pure emotion.

At the center of Carrey’s character, Fletcher Reede, is love for his son; with themes of fatherhood and parenthood the beating heart of the film. There’s inherent likability inside the hamminess, a trick Carrey delivers as if that combination is almost totally impossible. What Carrey pulls off is a performance that, in a fair world, should have garnered the actor an Oscar. Comedic turns, and comedy films in general, are arguably much more difficult to pull off as opposed to the understated and moody dramas the Academy likes to honor. Though, it was quickly proven that even when Carrey transformed himself into a formidable dramatic actor with 1999’s Man on the Moon, the Academy snubbed that too. (Thankfully, he was indeed nominated for a Golden Globe for Liar Liar).

What defines a feelgood movie, along with being a comfy joy to experience, are its bevy of rewatchable scenes: the kind that make you stop in your tracks when flicking through TV channels. (The Ringer’s Bill Simmons devised a whole delicious podcast about this). Liar Liar serves up can’t-miss-’em scenes in spades. In one of them, Carrey, realizing he’s cursed to tell the truth, tries to say that a blue pen is black but can’t bring himself to, later revealing he put himself through a physical wringer. (He later said the entire self-tussle had one simple direction: Fletcher “beats himself up”). Who can also forget Carrey’s epic meltdown after he’s baited into joining a stuffy meeting at the law firm and roasts everybody in sight? “You’ve got your head so far up Mr Alan’s ass, I can’t tell where you end and he begins!” The final courtroom showdown is another gem, rivaling any scene in A Few Good Men.

I vividly remember watching its epic LAX-set grand finale where Carrey’s Reede hijacks a mobile airplane stairway as his son Max is about to fly out of California and wowed by the hilarious spectacle of the stunt in a movie that, up until that point, consisted of scenes in courtrooms, offices and homes. But by the time we wrap things up with Carrey battered and bruised, albeit with his son back, the bloopers inserted at the end of the film demonstrating the insanity Carrey unleashed on set, were the cherry on top of the whole shebang, and stand as one of the rare cases of a gag reel being actually funny as opposed to a series of awkward flubs.

A cozy rewatch also reminds one of how a film with as many pure chuckles as Liar Liar is a nonexistent entity at theaters in the modern era. It’s almost as if recent studio comedies such as One Night Only and Anyone But You forgot they were supposed to elicit laughs, instead of subtle smirks at best. It’s also the type of movie one can take away lessons from at any point in their life. When I was 10 and watched Liar Liar, I obviously gravitated towards the kid’s perspective. But as the decades roll on, you can glean something from it at every stage of life.

It’s an underdog of a feelgood movie, and one that gets lost in the hubbub of fellow Carrey classics such as Dumb and Dumber. But whether the headlines got you down, it’s a rainy night or the family’s simply getting together, one can’t go wrong with popping on Carrey’s unreal tour de force in Liar Liar. And that’s the truth, so help me God.