Simon, a high school student, reads an essay in English about his parents - his mother, a respectable and naive young woman; his father, a would-be-terrorist. The Israeli authorities, questioning the woman - his mother - pregnant with him, years before. Simon’s teacher, Sabine, reading the fable, in his French class, of a thwarted terrorist attack, the week before. Simon it turns out is turning this chronicle into his acquire made-up autobiography. His parents are listless - a car accident? A deliberate accident on the piece of his inflamed Muslim father who can’t handle the prejudice in his family? Sabine…encouraging the boy to maintain with the memoir of his parents, the terrorists, to pretend it’s actual, to shock his classmates, and later a community of professors and “survivors” of the plane that never exploded, the attack that never happened. Simon’s uncle, Tom, who raised him, who hated his father, who took the child and brought him up in the city, not being able to afford it working his job as a tow-truck driver, wrestling with selling Simon’s violin, inherited from his musician mother, to pay their debts. Sabine, insinuating herself into the Simon’s life, and later his uncle’s…. the grandfather, tiresome several months, a presence in recorded video, excited at his son-in-law for being a radical, enraged at his son for not being more like him, enraged at the world and at the truth…whatever it might be.
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So in a nutshell is Atom Egoyan’s latest, another foray into lies, deceptions, half-truths, difficult generational issues, ethnicity and religion and identity. It’s tempting to say, been there, done that, and I can’t direct that temptation. This is all glorious familiar ground for Egoyan, and I’m not entirely positive that he offers great of anything that is really unique and though-provoking here to those who have seen his work before - though it might seem quite fresh to those who haven’t. It’s less sexual in orientation, less “perverse” I guess you could say than EXOTICA which it most immediately calls to mind; it’s fairly strongly concerned with video and the Internet and how they widen and broaden the aspects of truth- or lie-telling, as was his early feature SPEAKING PARTS, but it never quite goes into the unsafe psychological territories that film explored. The only really striking aspect for me in this film was in the character of the teacher Sabine (Egoyan’s muse, wife, longtime lead actress Arsinée Khanjian) who is so confused and messed up that she hangs unprejudiced a thread away from being a parody - but is roped into reality by the fierceness and intensity of Khanjian’s performance, possibly the best I’ve seen from her. It’s more often Egoyan’s male characters that tread the thin line over the chasm of despair and madness but here it is the female teacher, paunchy of secrets and never quite articulated desires who registers most powerfully.
As usual for the director, this has a strong feel for station (Toronto, mostly middle-class areas) and the characters all seem very self-aware - too great so, often. I’d like to view a uninteresting or even impartial an average, clueless character for once, actually. It’s radiant bleak stuff throughout, with violence and terrorism and racial hatred simmering but never quite boiling over in many scenes, and depression and lost hopes and desires filling great of the remainder of the station. Khanjian as I said is terrific, and she and Scott Speedman as Tom really have the film together - they’re solid nearly all the plot through so I really have to blame writer/director Egoyan for some of the stupider scenes, like one in which a taxi driver and Tom salvage into a ridiculously escalating argument seemingly objective to construct a residence point that has nothing to do with the scene. There were several uneven scenes, and as first-rate as Khanjian is she honest can’t quite overcome her character’s limitation as someone who’s fair wacky - or sane - enough for whatever the scene requires; then again, even the scenes that struck me ass “off” were disquieting in an moving plan - one wonders often objective how messed-up the director might really be. I also had something of a predicament with the really overbearing exhaust of music - stupid, dirgelike violin music through considerable of the film (by regular Egoyan collaborator Mychael Danna) and a couple of too-loud pop songs dominating a couple of behind scenes. The fact that music is an underlying theme in the film perhaps helps to account for these choices, but composed it seems to me that unruffled would have been more appropriate at a few points, but was never allowed to exist.
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All in all then a mixed bag. If you’ve seen a lot of Egoyan like I have you’ll certainly be familiar with great of what you eye - whether you consider it’s more absorbing or carried off better than I did is another fable. Worth a recognize overall; if I seem to be highlighting my criticisms, it’s probably because I ask a lot from this colossal director, one of Canada’s most distinguished film artists. Were we allowed half-stars, this would probably deserve 3 1/2; it’s harder than most to rate, because conflicted and irritated as I was by great of it, I’m mild thinking a pleasant deal about it.
From first frame to last, I had no understanding what was going to near next in this thought-provoking film from Canada. Others here may attempt to sum up the status, but the dream-like, stream of conscious connections that lead from one scene to the next are what I found enthralling. The movement is succor and forth in time, until it’s hardly certain what the “explain” is, while one assumption after another about characters and their motivations is turned on its head. What you judge is factual turns out to be only sort of so, and each revelation pulls you in even farther.
This is a movie for grown-ups, asking questions about the post-9/11 world we live in and wanting us to build sense of the scare and confusion around terrorism. Characters are not totally definite reduce. A schoolboy, his teacher, his uncle, his grandfather, and his stupid parents all plot our sympathy at times and then behave in ways that manufacture us seek information from their judgment.
Meanwhile, as a memoir about the boys’ parents, which may or may not be moral, explodes into chat rooms on the Internet, it ignites a fury of public discourse that takes on a manic life of its believe. The social environment, as mediated by digital technology, becomes a kind of Bedlam, where reason becomes completely unmoored. Without giving too great away, the film finally finds a puny respite of aloof for its characters to regard each other with a degree of trust, while paranoia and pandemonium rage on around them. Well worth watching, “Adoration” portrays inspiring ideas about the world we live in and argues for a measure of sanity to be found in connections between people who have shrimp in approved but their need to be at peace with each other.
I am a titanic fan of the Tyler Perry plays and this is definitely one of the best. It will definitely build you laugh and will probably develop you weep. The singing is extraordinary! By the extinguish, the entire audience was on their feet. You will not regret this bewitch!
