irector Atom Egoyan picks up the theme that is core to all of his films — sexual transgression — this time in a mainly well-acted but anti-climatic who-done-it set in the late 1950s. Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon) and Vince Collins (Colin Firth) play a Martin and Lewis comedy team at the top of their game when a young woman is discovered dead in their hotel bathroom.
The story unfolds in a series of flashbacks as another young woman, a writer-journalist (Alison Lohman) who was a childhood fan of the duo (and who confusingly resembles the murdered woman), insinuates herself into their lives to try to find out who did it. She does; and on her way there is immersed in a sordid world of the behind-the-scenes sex and drugs and dirty little secrets that shock no longer. Kevin Bacon carries the show as a screwed-up, but oddly sympathetic comedian. Firth, as a despondent psychopath, is underused. Lohman, like so many of Egoyan’s female characters, delivers her lines with all the nuance of a robot. While the film is beautifully shot, the final revelation is too little too late.
