Adoration

When I saw The Sweet Hereafter years ago, I thought Atom Egoyan was one of the greatest directors alive, and the subsequent films haven't really shaken that belief. If Adoration is not up to the standard of his best work, it is still well worth seeing. The story is one of terrible loss and forgiveness, and the acting is superb. We are connecting the dots--from racist grandfather to despairing mother to an orphan teenager (played by the excellent Devon Bostick) with big issues around truth and responsibility. The boy's uncle has a lot of issues himself; we can see that being a tow-truck driver is gnawing at his soul (made me think of Repo Man). Scott Speedman as the uncle is really good, he's hiding behind a beard, giving curt responses to Arsinée Khanjian's questions.

A problem: lots of use of internet chat rooms to flesh out the story; disembodied, undramatic characters for Simon to interact with (watch for the great Maury Chaykin to heat things up somewhat). Technology is not a launching pad for art, it's just information retrieval or anger management.

Atom Egoyan's Adoration weaves a complex tale of a young man searching for the truth about his family by perpetuating a lie in order to witness its consequences. Simon (Devon Bostick), a young high school student, tells his class that his Lebanese father Sami (Noam Jenkins) was a terrorist who attempted to blow up a plane with a bomb carried by his pregnant wife, Rachel (Rachel Blanchard), a talented violinist. In his presentation to the class, Simon says that he is the unborn child, his mother was the innocent being led to her demise, and his father was the killer out to murder 400 innocent people to promote a cause. The only problem with the story is that it is not true. The incident never happened. The film exposes the ease with which people are willing to accept what they are told without question and how modern technology has become a useful tool for those eager to disseminate falsehood.

According to the director, the film is "about people dealing with absences. He (Simon) imagines having a father who is a demon; he wants to go as far as possible into what that might mean." Adoration begins with an indelible image – a young woman standing at the end of a pier overlooking a river playing the violin while her husband and young son watch in awe. Moving forward and backward in time with great ease, the film slowly constructs the events which have led to Simon's school confessional. The key player is Simon's French teacher Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian) whose own family was killed in Lebanon by a terrorist attack. Sabine reads an article to the class about an incident that occurred in 1986 in which a Jordanian man, Nezar Hindawi, sent his pregnant Irish girlfriend on an El Al flight with a bomb in her handbag, of which she had no knowledge until it was discovered by Israeli airport security.

Heavily influenced by his bigoted grandfather Morris (Kenneth Walsh) to believe that his father intentionally caused his mother's death in a car crash, the vulnerable Simon constructs a parallel between the article read by his French teacher and the death of his parents. On his own, Simon posts his fake story on the Internet and has to deal with emotional responses from holocaust victims, holocaust deniers, students, and professors talking about terrorism, martyrdom, and heroism. It is a discussion that often sinks to the level of victimization as portrayed by veteran actor Maury Chaykin who blames the bogus airplane incident for "ruining" his life. Simon's uncle, Tom (Scott Speedman), who raised the boy after his parents' death, acts as a mediator between his nephew and the teacher who encourages Simon to tell his fake story in the school auditorium.

Tom is a tow truck operator with a short fuse who harbors a deep resentment against his father for the way he was treated as a child and his encounters with Sabine contain some of the film's most intense moments. Aided by a tenderly evocative violin-prominent soundtrack by Mychael Danna, Adoration is an intelligent and imaginative study of family conflict and reconciliation that serves as a compelling probe into human behavior and the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction. Though it contains a great deal of ambiguity and character motivations tend to be somewhat mystifying, Adoration is a very involving film with performances that are uniformly excellent, particularly Arsinee Khanjian as the emotionally-damaged teacher and Speedman and Bostock who provide enough tension to keep us riveted throughout.

As with other films by Egoyan, this one starts with a lot of loose ends that are tied together as the film progresses. The writer/director is fond of moving back and forth in time and balancing multiple plot threads. While it is intriguing, there is a pretentious streak running through it that undermines the narrative. There are too many scenes of characters pontificating in chat rooms and too much focus on technological gadgets. His films don't always succeed, but Egoyan should be applauded for taking chances. There are good performances from Speedman, Bostick, and Egoyan's favorite actress (and wife), Khanjian.

There is not much to say about this convoluted story. Its based on a real event. It relies on lots of talk and minimal action. Atom Egoyan had full control in making this film, from writing to direction. The main pluses are the performances of the principal three of the principal actors. The main negative is the questionable use of "technology", particularly of teenage chat rooms, of older people chat rooms, of video cell phones and so on - the focus of these internet & tech based products is to present talking heads by other means. There is also a violin, which is the one major non-tech focus of the story.

There is no doubt that this film has potential. It has the making of a compelling plot, given its built in twists, turns and periodic surprises. Could it have been presented in a more exciting and direct way? Maybe not given budget considerations, which are so obvious.

At an early point, the movie takes on that feeling of seeming to go on and on and on. But, there is an interesting, underlying story. And Egoyan is a skilled and always worthwhile filmmaker. So, one persists watching, with some judicious use of occasional fast forwarding of the DVD (particularly the seemingly endless, ridiculous multi-channel computer talkfests). The film has craft and is a serious endeavour. But in the end, it is boring. And boring is boring.

A teenager (Devon Bostick) who was orphaned after the tragic deaths of his parents is prompted by his teacher (Arsinee Khanjian) to deliver a fictional monologue about his father's failed terrorist act as fact in an elaborate "dramatic exercise" in Armenian-Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan's latest thought-provoking piece of abstraction "Adoration". As the fiction spins out of control over the internet, the true motives of those involved in the lie are revealed and back-stories come collapsing in on each other in Egoyan's signature elliptical style.

Egoyan, as always, gives patient viewers plenty to chew on. Like the young man's monologue that marries a true story to a false one about his parents, "Adoration" itself is an interesting dramatic experiment designed to provoke. It tackles many issues including the motives of terrorists, fractured familial relationships, the hollowness of alleged connections made through modern technology and the dangers of thinking those connections can replace real face-to-face human interaction. Though I always question Egoyan's motive in casting his wife Arsinee Khanjian in his films, in many ways, she gives her most understated and powerful performance here. Bostick does a decent job with a tough role, though Rachel Blanchard is curiously flat in the flashbacks as his mother. The true revelation is Scott Speedman as the troubled tow-truck driver who reluctantly steps in to raise his sister's son after she dies. His story arc proves to be the most involving, though one wishes his background had been more developed.

The bizarre detour into sleazy mediocrity with "Where the Truth Lies" seems to have made Egoyan a little rusty as he returns to a more familiar form here for those who have been watching the arc of his career. The elliptical folding in of the converging plot lines seems clumsier in "Adoration" than it did in his earlier works, and the "big reveal" comes a few scenes too early and sucks out the emotional impact. Unlike "Exotica" which had the swagger of a young auteur at the top of his game, or "The Sweet Hereafter" which came from the sublime source material of novelist Russell Banks, "Adoration" represents Egoyan bruised from years of wear left to his own devices. Though compelling, he gets the best of himself and let's the ideas take over the characters. He also relies far too much on visuals of non-characters in chat rooms or of people being recorded with cameras. However, Egoyan scores when Mychael Danna lends his musical compositions. The frequent collaborator does a magnificent job creating a haunting score with a recurring violin motif that plays integral to one of the back-stories.

Back in the late 1990's Atom Egoyan was in a league of his own and master of his own style. In the past ten years, however, international cinema has seen the emergence of filmmakers like Mexico's Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu ("Amores Perros", "21 Grams" and "Babel") and Germany's Fa-tih Akin (whose superb "The Edge of Heaven" deserved a bigger audience stateside last year). They often tackle similar themes in an elliptical Egoyanesque manner. But because their films are presented on a larger scale and infused with a certain energy and immediacy, Egoyan's films, in all their isolated scholarly austerity, have been unfairly left out in the cold. "Adoration" may not be Egoyan's best, but it proves he still has some good ideas in him and he isn't ready to be dismissed just yet.