Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas (2019)
Katie Arneson (Kacey Rohl), a dance student at college in Hamilton, Ontario, is something of a campus celebrity and heroine. Her face is all over the place on posters promoting her crowd-funding campaign, to cover her next round of cancer treatment in Seattle. It’s a new, expensive form of immunotherapy and there’s still a way to go to hit the $10,000 target; but a fundraiser is coming up in the next few days, and Katie is popular – liked and respected by fellow students, loved by Jennifer (Jen) Ellis (Amber Anderson), her English girlfriend. The thing is, Katie doesn’t have cancer at all.
As a liar, Katie is as conscientious as she’s fluent. She shaves her head; exposes an upper arm scar – the legacy, she says, of surgery to remove her original melanoma; takes tablets that include (along with placebos) appetite suppressants. She’s a picture of ill health. She tells people she tires easily but that doesn’t stop her from dancing – which makes her all the more admirable. Katie’s also in the process of applying for a $2,000 bursary to be awarded to a student with serious health issues. Julia Stansfield (Christine Horne), one of the college staff, thinks she stands a good chance of success but the awarding body hasn’t received copies of her medical records and the application deadline is imminent. Katie looks convincingly puzzled as she tells Julia she’s already submitted the documents – no problem, though, she’ll bring further copies to the departmental office tomorrow. In fact, there is a problem. The urgent need for paperwork attesting to her illness triggers accumulating complications that supply the tangled-web plot of White Lie.
The Canadian writer-directors Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas (both in their mid-thirties) reveal Katie as a fraud at an early stage, inviting us to engage with a protagonist whose behaviour is indefensible. This is a bolder undertaking than it would be in a film where the offender is a flamboyantly entertaining monster rather than, as Katie is, a credible ordinary person. Lewis and Thomas later reveal something of her troubled adolescence. She blames her father for her mother’s suicide, in light of which Katie faked a different kind of illness so as to delay returning to school. Even so, this backstory hardly amounts to an explanation of her present deception, let alone an excuse for it. We have to deal with Katie as she now is. By avoiding emphatic censure of her, Lewis and Thomas ensure that we decide what to think of this dominant central character.
Their focus on Katie allows Lewis and Thomas to describe, as if peripherally but to shocking effect, the corruption of medical professionals who enable her to prolong her pretence. She regularly gets her medications from Owen (Connor Jessup), a lab worker. She asks if he knows someone who could supply fake records and Owen puts her in touch with a young hospital doctor called Jabari Jordan (Thomas Olajide). He obliges, reluctantly and at a price. (Jordan’s one-off fee is exactly the value of the bursary Katie’s planning to use his forgery to obtain.) Later in the story, when her credibility has been publicly challenged, Owen gets Katie an appointment with Dr Becker (Darrin Baker), an older practitioner. He’s more than willing to devise a detailed programme of subterfuge for the longer term – at an even higher price.
Successful fund-raiser she may be but Katie can’t afford the doctors’ charges without help from elsewhere. The devoted, well-off Jen is always ready to provide the cash Katie needs and always swallows the untrue story of what she needs it for. But the tight schedule for paying Jordan, in order to get her medical records filed with the bursary application, forces Katie to seek help from a different quarter – her estranged father, Doug (Martin Donovan). White Lie features good naturalistic acting through the whole cast and Katie’s pivotal exchange with her father is a highlight. Doug listens, wary but apparently sympathetic to what Katie is saying, before explaining that he and his new partner have remortgaged their home and he doesn’t have the money to help. Still speaking quietly, he goes on to say that he wouldn’t help even if he could. Doug, recalling what happened with her in high school, doesn’t believe his daughter.
The structure of White Lie requires Kacey Rohl to carry the film, and she does. Rohl conveys especially well how lying has become second nature to Katie: the fact that she’s well aware of what she’s doing makes her actions no less compulsive, though she’s calculating too. When Doug leaves a voicemail on Jen’s phone, Katie manages to delete it and block further calls from him on the number. Doug then takes the more drastic step of putting a post on Katie’s crowd-funding page, announcing, ‘with a heavy heart’, what he’s sure is her deception. Kacey Rohl is effective, too, in realising Katie’s aptitude for attack-as-the-best-means-of-defence, for making herself the injured party. When she sees what Doug has done, she marches round to the home of her college friend Kadisha (Zahra Bentham), whose mother Colette (Sharon Lewis) is a lawyer: Katie wants to sue her father. Later on, she breaks off from a showdown with Jen to take a phone call from a local radio station. They’d like to interview Katie as part of a series about people on the receiving end of social media abuse or allegations. She accepts with alacrity.
Jen is horrified to think she’s being deceived but when they resume their heart-to-heart after the radio station call, Katie is even more emotional than her distraught partner. She says she’s always been fearful of losing Jen, worried that the cancer might drive Jen away. It’s not just in this big scene that Katie, suggesting she‘s the one liable to be betrayed, exploits the idea that people not suffering from cancer can feel uneasy being close to someone who is. You wonder if this is also an element of why Katie has been putting on an act in the first place: her illness, as well as making her the centre of attention, allows her to keep her distance. Both those things make her special, as does the combination of getting noticed and guarding a secret. (Lewis and Thomas make more imaginative use of the isolating effects of cancer than the writer and directors of another recent film, Ordinary Love.)
Does Katie have genuine feelings for Jen? If she loves her (and feels loved by Jen), isn’t she inclined to tell Jen the truth and hope to be forgiven? The answer to both questions could be yes; the way that answer emerges is, typically of White Lie, singularly complicated. After Becker has outlined how they go about sustaining her seemingly life-threatening condition, Katie confounds him by asking about the possibility of a programme to work towards remission. Is this because her life with cancer is getting just too complicated or because she sees a potentially happy future with Jen (even if she means to arrives at it via another lie)? Colette is likewise astonished when Katie, after seeking (and getting) assurance that her feigned illness in high school isn’t something she can now be punished for, asks if that would also be the case if she was inventing illness now. In the short exchange that follows, Katie virtually admits to shamming her cancer – before reiterating that she intends to sue Doug. Her admission to Colette is startling not only because it’s unexpected but also because of how Katie expresses it: this isn’t a confession of wrongdoing, just a matter of fact. It’s also a foretaste of what will happen in the film’s remarkable closing scene.
Katie’s tearful protestations to Jen have the desired effect. The two go to bed reconciled; in a taxi en route to the radio station, a few hours later, Jen is insistent that Katie mustn’t be secretive any longer about her cancer treatments: from now on, Jen says, she wants to be with her all the way. The absolute assurance of support appears to trigger another sudden outburst of sincerity from Katie, as she waits with Jen outside the room where her interview will take place. Soon afterwards, she’s called in. Jen doesn’t react dramatically to what Katie tells her. She looks through the glass of the recording studio at her partner’s face, animated by her new feelings of security in their relationship and the prospect of going on air to execrate her father. Jen’s face also wears an unaccustomed expression that says she now realises the truth. When Katie inadvertently came clean to Colette, the latter gave her the card of a colleague to contact if Katie really did want to start legal proceedings. Colette then levelly asked Katie to leave her house. Similarly calm, Jen prepares to exit the radio station and, perhaps, Katie’s life. The message of both sequences is that, for Katie, dishonesty was the best policy.
I liked and admired White Lie in spite of its strongly unpleasant subject. Lewis and Thomas have created an authentic character study rather than a case study, and cleverly use Katie’s personality to justify what would otherwise come over as implausible bits of plotting. When you watch that early sequence in which Julia Stansfield brings up the missing medical records, you wonder how Katie could possibly have expected to avoid the issue. As you get to know her, you accept that she would dare to hope she might. By the same token, Jen’s endless credulity might seem hard to accept; but she is in love with Katie, and Katie is repeatedly persuasive in justifying herself to Jen. It’s refreshing to see a new independent film from North America in which the characters aren’t defined by their sexual or ethnic identity. Katie and Jen are lesbian, Jordan is a man of colour, as Becker is white: their actions aren’t explained by these factors. Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas have the skill and integrity not to stack the deck or preach to the converted. They demand their audience make up its own mind.
12 August 2020
