The Honest Liar

Author(s): Douglas Reese
Location: Ohio

“The Honest Liar"

Written and Directed by David Cronenberg
Produced by David Cronenberg
Opening and Closing Theme by Howard Shore
Film Editing by Henry Adamson
Cinematography by David Cronenberg

Principal Cast:

Jeremy Sumpter … Ace Hepprod
Evan Rachel Wood … Lavender Hepprod
Paul Newman … Officer Collins

Tagline: "I Love You Honey … I Didn’t Mean To Do It … Sorry For Beating Your Brains In"

Synopsis: “The Honest Liar” is a masterpiece film by critically-acclaimed director David Cronenberg, showing 103 minutes, all in one take, of the journey of a menacing teenager whose anger takes him beyond his own limits and leads him to the dark depths of his own madness. Ace (Sumpter) is nineteen and a party boy, deciding to take his wife of the same age, Lavender (Wood), to his fathers cabin deep in the woods, next to Warsaw Pond. Ace hopes to recuperate with Lavender after she caught him in an affair with a friend of hers a few days earlier. Lavender begins to believe Ace might not even care as strongly about her as she believed. But, Ace tells her he loves her. And after a small argument regarding Ace’s feelings, Ace pulls a pistol from his sleeping bag and shoots Lavender in the arm, neck, and head. “You stalking bitch!” he pathetically screams. He then takes the gun and begins to smash her face in, blood squirting on his face after he was finished with the bloody massacre.

But after the murder, Ace kneels next to her and begins to uncontrollably cry. He hugs her tight and seconds later, he stuffs her body, the pistol, and a few rocks into the sleeping bag and dumps her into the pond. Running back to the cabin, Ace cleans up the cabin and takes a shower, disturbingly masturbating while muttering the name “William” under his breath. After Ace is finished, he gets out of the shower and reaches for the folded towel. The pistol falls from the towel. Rattled, Ace takes the gun and goes back to the pond to toss it back in. On his way back to the cabin, Ace begins to talk to himself saying things like “mom you won’t listen to me” and “if I do it you promise you’ll give me ice cream”. One he gets back into the cabin, he begins to cook a microwave burrito. He sits down like he’s about to eat the burrito, but instead begins to viciously stab it with his fork while repeating, “I love you,” crying emotionally. All of a sudden, there’s a knock on the door. Looking out the window, Ace sees it’s a cop.

Ace welcomes the cop in, who states his name is Officer Collins (Newman) and for ten minutes, uncut, the officer talks to Ace like a normal human being about how a neighbor complained about a gunshot and how the weather is actually pretty nice. Officer Collins believes Ace when he tells him that there was no gunshot and a gullible but somewhat suspicious Collins walks slowly toward the police car. Ace watches nervously through the window as Collins gets on the side of the car and slowly bends over to pick up … the pistol. Ace is scared and he cries maniacally as he thinks hard about his wrongful actions and finally gets the courage to run out the door to Collins, screaming “I love you, will you do it to me again, make sure to give me ice cream afterward but I promise I will suck your wee-wee.” A cringing Collins arrests Ace after he screams, “I didn’t mean to kill you sweetie, I fucking love you! I love you honey! I just had sex with him once, only once”. Collins gets ready to stick Ace into the backseat of the car when Ace begins to manically and uncontrollably scream, “Help, help me mom, help!” Collins looks into the car noticing the dead body of a woman, her face pounded in. The film ends on a quietly discouraging final note as we fade to a quiet end credits.

What the press would say:

In the style of Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Rope’, the one-take “The Honest Liar” is a visually stunning, brutally cold, and painfully tragic tale about the powers of guilt and the uncontrollable loss of your own sanity. Director Cronenberg delivers his haunting story with great depth, as the characters seem to do things a real person actually would. For instance, notice the sequence where Ace talks to Lavender about the affair. The way his eye twitches, his lips shake, and the way he speaks sounding honest and true when the audience, along with Lavender, know he’s not. It’s very cold and heartless and for that Sumpter’s performance comes out way more chilling and fantastic than the joyful one he did in ‘Peter Pan’. A scene that shows Sumpter’s true talent is the scene where he takes a shower. We do not cut away like the average American film; instead we linger in on his privacy of the character that, even though he just killed somebody, begins to bitterly masturbate. It seems all the more authentic thanks to Cronenberg’s striking cinematography purposely used on a cheap DV camera, making the movie all the more unsettling. We are in the grip of a sick character, one that is unapologetic and disturbingly awful. We never love him, but hate him. And we love to hate him. “Sumpter gives a great performance in a tragic, disturbing, and greatly effective journey into the twisted minds of the problems in this unforgivable madman. It’s one of the year’s best performances, and one of the year’s best films!” (Richard Roeper, Ebert and Roeper)

FYC

Picture
Director
O. Screenplay
Actor (Sumpter)
Supporting Actor (Newman)
Film Editing