A Little White Lie

Like reading every other chapter of a book, A Little White Lie struggles to tie its bursts of inspiration into a cohesive cinematic page-turner.

It’s a playful satire of the literary world, a romantic farce, a mistaken-identity mystery, a surreal odyssey of mental illness, and a lampoon of contemporary academia.

Yet as it probes the gray area between fact and fiction, this uneven fish-out-of-water comedy is overloaded with quirks and whimsy rather than grounded in reality, leaving the esteemed cast with too much heavy lifting to sell the ruse.

It’s set at a fictional college whose beloved literary festival is endangered because of budget cuts. With the faculty desperately trying to secure a prestigious speaker to boost attendance, Simone (Kate Hudson) pins her hopes on a long shot.

That would be Shriver (Michael Shannon), an illiterate New York handyman who responded cryptically to Simone’s inquiry that might have been sent to him by mistake. After all, the real Shriver wrote a breakthrough novel two decades ago and then disappeared from public view.

His erratic behavior during their initial meeting leaves Simone skeptical but determined to follow through. As the suspected hoax becomes more elaborate, it becomes less clear exactly who’s fooling who, and for what purpose.

Once you buy into the film’s contrived premise, Shannon finds hard-earned sympathy in the enigmatic and troubled Shriver, although many of the periphery characters lack complexity. The supporting cast includes Don Johnson, Zach Braff, and Peyton List.

The warm-hearted screenplay by director Michael Maren (A Short History of Decay) toys with the allure of anonymity that follows misanthropic, reclusive writers, while also tweaking their pretentious bookworm fans.

However, it doesn’t explore those shallow surface observations with much depth, nor does it balance some of the broader comic elements with a darker and more profound character study about guilt, redemption, and reconciling with your past.

Meanwhile, the muddled plot mechanics prevent the film from generating consistent incentive for emotional investment in the final-act resolution of the manufactured mystery.

There are laughs along the way. But struggling to wrangle its disparate tones and subplots into a coherent examination of art and commerce, A Little White Lie winds up deceiving moviegoers most of all.

Rated R, 101 minutes.