No fibbing, Mirren and McKellen are simply marvellous
MARTIN SCORSESE’S epic film The Irishman (see above) might showcase American acting royalty, but The Good Liar offers us the British version — with Dame Helen Mirren and Sir Ian McKellen lending proper heft to a complex tale of deception.
It strains and eventually threatens to snap credulity, yet remains appealingly watchable thanks to its two great leads.
It starts beguilingly, with two elderly people, both widowed, contacting each other via an online dating site, swapping small fibs about whether
they smoke or drink. They meet for dinner and confess that they also fibbed about their names. He is Roy (McKellen) and she is Betty (Mirren).
Anyone who remembers McKellen as con man Mel Hutchwright in Coronation Street ten years or so back will know just how good he is at playing the treacle-voiced charmer with a dishonest agenda, but here he is a few degrees more rotten than mendacious Mel.
Roy is a crooked businessman whose designs on Betty are principally financial, not romantic, and who is not averse to having people nobbled if they stand in the way of his nefarious schemes.
When he feigns a bad knee and she invites him to stay in her bungalow rather than hobble up several flights to his top-floor London flat, the stage is perfectly set for him to swindle her out of her life savings, with the help of his similarly bent accomplice (Jim Carter).
Her grandson (Russell Tovey) seems faintly suspicious of the old boy’s motives, but even he, it appears, is eventually won over.
Nonetheless, Bill Condon’s film (he also directed McKellen in 2015’ s elegiac Mr Holmes), which is adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher from a novel of the same name, doesn’t work too hard to suppress the idea that Roy will get his comeuppance, quite possibly at the hands of Betty herself.
After all, why cast Mirren if what you want is an entirely gullible old biddy?
Yet there are lots of twists and turns before the story reaches its resolution, with some flashbacks to Nazi Germany crucial to a narrative that ties itself in several knots too many.
Happily, those mighty Ms, Mirren and McKellen, wring this tale of every ounce of value.