Pants on Fire: dark comedy. Starring Christy Baron, Harry O’Reilly, Neil Maffin, Arija Bareikis, Eileen Brennan and Karen Young.  Written and directed by Rocky Collins.

American Beauty skeptics might be more intrigued and pleased with Pants on Fire, a very sly and subtle suburban comedy of manners that works the same well-manicured neighborhood as the current Oscar front runner. But, to me at least, it’s is the better film. Its irresistible title alone was enough to heighten my expectations.

The title does duty as a double-pun that plays on both the “Liar Liar” kid’s rhyme and the overpowering libido of its central character, Julie Hammer (Christy Baron).  Julie, a dedicated Kindergarten teacher, is the nicest of middle-class wives: patient, understanding to a fault. She’s just a girl who can’t say no. Not to anyone. Certainly not to her husband, hard-driving Assistant DA Max Hammer (Harry O’Reilly), who’s in the middle of a nasty election campaign for the top job.

And certainly not to the man she’s having an affair with, Barry Grogan (Neil Maffin). Barry is a fellow kindergarten teacher and Julie’s collaborator on a children’s book they’re writing and illustrating together with the ingenious title of  “Good Bunny, Bad Bunny.”  Ingenious in part because Julie and Barry themselves are a pair of shtupbunnies who think nothing of rolling around in the classroom after school or in the back of Barry’s station wagon right by the playground (while the car rocks away with passion, a little kid bicycles obliviously by ringing his bell). They’re both in love with deception and danger. Pants on Fire is, on one level, about how our civilized masks are cracked open by unruly Nature. 

Barry’s not only in love with Julie, he has something Julie doesn’t have: children.  Barry is also a gentle pacifist Christian of profound integrity compared to the ambitious opportunistic Max.  Julie thinks this is what she wants from Barry, but what she really wants most of all is the child neither man wants to give her.

Still, she’s happy to go along with the status quo of secrets and lies until Barry maneuvers her into telling Max about the affair by telling his own wife Deirdre (Karen Young). Things fall apart from here on in as Julie, too “nice” to make up her mind and tell the truth and further confused by her own drives, bounces back and forth between the two men like a ping pong ball. In truth, she’s not really nice at all.

How Julie finally resolves her dilemma is the central story in this witty, often delightful film about a sticky three-cornered romance.  The humor goes for the clever and sly instead of the broad variety. Pants on Fire takes a more realistic approach to characterization.  The way the relationships intertwine as Julie haplessly zigzags between and around her lovers is reminiscent of classics like Max Ophuls’ The Earrings of Madame de . . . or even Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game. That might make the movie too slow, too “European” for some tastes.  In fact, Pants on Firemay be too well mannered. We get enough lies, but not enough sex. We never really see Julie and her men in the throes of sexual passion, (with her “pants on fire”) and so we miss a central facet of her character that would also further illustrate why Max and Barry stick to her like they do. Her “niceness” can’t be enough. More raunchy playfulness would have helped.

Its view of the middle class is more forgiving and benevolent than American Beauty’s cliched, condescending bombast. I saw American Beauty as an example of how rich liberal Hollywood talks down to tacky suburbia and reinforces a lot of lazy stereotypes that were fresh when they appeared in The Graduate thirty three years ago.  Pants on Fire feels like a movie made by people who actually know that world from the inside. And there’s no easy miraculous ending either, though it does end with a dark and funny miracle. Julie manages to absorb both men into her life in surprising fashion.  And still remains “nice.”

Also fascinating is how our perspectives on Max and Barry change. Viewers may find their sympathies shifting as the movie wends its way through their ambivalent emotions.  This is also a movie about the truth and its consequences and one of its delights is in how one man learns to deal with truth, while the other remains an obtuse hypocrite. The film says we need our deceptions almost as much as we need the truth, but it’s never clunkily pretentious about it. 

Writer-director Rocky Collins’ screenplay is sharply observant and works most of the time, except for a couple of scenes of Julie and Max undergoing marriage counseling that feel too contrived. They seem to exist to help Collins focus his themes rather than to drive the story forward.  His direction is full of amusing details.  Max, (well played by O’ Reilly) passionately formalizes everything with legal contracts. There’s one clever bit involving answering machine music. The film is shot in brown tonalities that better reflect the murky souls of its characters than a more bright candy-colored approach would.

Christy Baron, as Julie, is delightful throughout.  She makes Julie as cunning a political operator in her way as her husband; yet, simultaneously she makes us believe she truly believes she’s “nice.” Baron gives Julie an unusual knowing daffyness. She knows her effect on the two men, but is still so much in the grip of her own drives (and deeply in denial about them), that she remains sympathetic even at her most annoying.

Pants on Fire is not the zany bedroom farce the title promises, but remains an entertaining thoughtful human comedy of middle class lives breaking on the rock of need and desire. It neatly and knowingly paints a world where façades may be the price of getting along . . . but still a mask is only a mask. It still keeps slipping.