The Invention of Lying

That’s right: “Invention’’ is a mainstream movie that posits God as man’s most desperately inspired leap of imagination. Cheeky monkey. With such big game in their sights, though, the filmmakers shift their aim and instead bag a sweet but toothless romantic comedy, the kind we’ve seen many, many times before. “The Invention of Lying’’ is a disappointment, then: Not the Ricky Gervais breakthrough that he and we deserve, but merely another promising holding maneuver.

That said, there are laughs here, dodging amateurish filmmaking and story construction while managing to hit their targets. Gervais shares scripting and directing credit with writer-comedian Matthew Robinson, and their setup is a good one: What if the imagination required to deviate from the facts had never evolved? And what would happen if one average schmo figured out the benefits of saying something that wasn’t true?

Everyone would believe him, of course; they wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. Mark Bellison (Gervais) comes up with his first whopper - a minor bit of larceny - and both he and the movie dance with delight at the possibilities. Sex with beautiful women? As long as you tell them the world will end right now. Free money, cars, houses? Provided you can construct the right lie, it’s all yours.

What lies can’t buy is love, since it doesn’t actually exist in this world. Mark is sweet for a leggy ditz named Anna (Jennifer Garner), who thinks he’s rather nice but won’t risk the genetic possibility of kids who might look like him. (She’d rather date Mark’s rival, a preening sleaze played by Rob Lowe.)

It’s a lie told to benefit someone else that gets the hero into his hottest water: Mark calms his dying mother (Fionnula Flanagan) with a vision of a place up above among those she loves and, presto, he has invented Heaven. The media camps out on his door, demanding to know what else he knows, and, frazzled, he comes up with a Big Man in the Sky. And they believe that.