Adoration: 5/10
Adoration (2009): 5/10
Atom Egoyan’s latest film explores some post 9/11 issues as well as the idea of stories and the lines between fiction and reality. Forgive this review. I watched this about 5 days ago and have seen Antichrist since then and thus all other images have sort of left by brain due to the overpowering nature of the aforementioned film.
Atom Egoyan is a director whose work I am very interested in even if I have not gotten of it yet. I think The Sweet Hereafter is one of the top 10 greatest films of the 1990’s and I really liked Felicia’s Journey but I thought his 2005 work Where the Truth Lies was a disaster and one of the few films I have outright hated. Adoration is the third film of his I have seen and it is a very mixed bag.
The story concerns a boy named Simon. He uses a translating exercise in his high school French class and imagines that the story being translated is something that has happened to him. The story involves a Palestinian man who puts his wife on a plane saying that he will join her in a few days. In the meantime, he planted a bomb on his wife who was also pregnant at the time. The bomb was discovered while going through security. Simon’s parents, a Palestinian father and his Canadian (I would assume) mother were both killed in a car crash a few years before. The circumstances of the accident have always been suspicious to Simon who is further fueled by claims that his grandfather makes before his death that the car accident was no accident. In the meantime, he lives with his Uncle Tom who has raised him since his parents’ death. His French teacher Sabine encourages this association Simon has made with the story and wants him to “perform” it in front of the class as a drama exercise and as if it were real (the other students are meant to think it is real). Her actions are confusing but it is because she has other motives as well.
All of this must sound like some crazy weird mystery but it is not played that way at all. It is straight drama. There are a few reasons why I think that overall the film does not quite work the way Egoyan wants it to. The first is that I think he keeps too much from the audience and too much out of order chronologically. It takes a long time to get a footing as to what is going on because it jumps all over the place without declaring itself to be a film that is stylistically doing that and because it keeps a lot of key information from us until the end. I think he jumbles things up because he thinks it would be more interesting. Certain films told out of order survive on this and would not be as interesting without the gimmick. The film does not start at the end or anything; it just jumps slightly around all the time so that it is always kind of in order but kind of not at the same time. I think this hinders the film. I think the flashback sequences were properly placed but the A story jumbling was unnecessary and took away from the film. It is an interesting enough story to function better chronologically. This was my big dispute. The film would have lost nothing to do this.
I also felt uninterested in Simon himself. I enjoyed the scenes (there are many) when he speaks to all of his classmates on webcams online and listens in on other discussions in groups about his story. It was interesting to see him sit back and watch the controversy unfold before him. Simon’s calm exterior juxtaposed with the passion of his classmates for his own supposedly true story makes for a great dichotomy. Other than this though, I was interested in everything else going on besides the scenes with him. Even though other characters (who I will get to in a minute) are in many scenes without Simon, he is a huge part of the film and it does not really work for me because of his uninteresting personality.
All parts of the film I was interested in were anything concerning Uncle Tom and Sabine and especially the two of them together. Scott Speedman plays Tom who I would have never had recognized as being the same actor from The Strangers if I had not known the name. It could have been a very stereotypical sort of performance but Speedman really brings out the humanity in this character and by the end he has put in a really good performance. Egoyan’s wife Arsinee Khanjian plays Sabine who is one of my favorite characters in a film this year. Her actions can be very frustrating and some of her choices may seem very unrealistic and inappropriate to others but the way she handles her situation throughout the film is what makes her interesting to me. Her scenes with Tom are my favorites in the film. The flashbacks are handled nicely as well with Rachel Blanchard and Noam Jenkins playing Rachel and Sami, Simon’s parents.
It sounds like I really liked the film but honestly the complaints I have about it felt extremely substantial to me as I watched it. I liked it enough but for me, its problems that I take from it bring the film down to a very mediocre grade. The aspects of the film that I liked I really loved but as a whole the film is too bogged down in certain elements and it never coalesces the way I wanted it to.
