Adoration

Adoration

100 Minutes

What director Atom Egoyan achieves in Adoration (and all is his films), is a gift to the viewer: an intricately plotted and stylized mind trip. As always, he’s not so much concerned with revealing plot as revealing character and has a list of common threads that are present in all his projects: the differences between appearance and reality and the subjective nature of truth. Conflicting agendas and hidden histories. How people deal with the universal need for a sense of family and the psychic contortions individuals undergo in order to feel whole. Egoyan’s particular genius is his ability to weave these and other interests into a coherent work of art that illuminates the human condition, while creating a unique, provocative film language that breaks away from cinema’s written-word and theatrical precursors. You can walk away from his films feeling and thinking many things, but what lingers is the suggestion that you might not know yourself as well as you think.

A teenage boy, Simon (Devon Bostick), completes a French class assignment translating a newspaper story about a man who planted a bomb on his pregnant girlfriend and then re-imagines the story as if the couple were his own parents, and he the unborn child his father plotted to blow up along with his mother and 400 other passengers on a flight to Israel. Simon’s teacher, Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian), who seems to know more secrets than she cares to reveal about herself, encourages him to read his story to the class as if he really is the son of the couple in the newspaper story. When he puts his story out on the internet it starts to have an impact he never imagined. His friends, random folks philosophizing about terrorism and the actual survivors of the botched bombing attempt, are all drawn to his story and the reaction is swift and strong. Simon’s Uncle Tom (Scott Speedman) has raised him since Simon’s father crashed the family car, killing both himself and his wife. Encouraged by his bigoted grandfather (Kenneth Welsh), Simon has always feared that the accident was intentional and uses his storytelling to work through his own doubts about the death of his parents and secrets he doesn’t understand about his family dynamic and history.

Simon’s real memories of his parents are juxtaposed against an imaginary history as the child of the couple in the story; as an observer, Egoyan cuts back and forth between seemingly unconnected scenes and frequently leads the audience to make incorrect assumptions until, at last, the various pieces start fitting together. He does not confuse for confusion’s sake and in Adoration, form follows function; his prismatic, fragmented structures and multiple time frames allow viewers to draw their incorrect assumptions. Egoyan illustrates that, whenever we first meet someone, we invariably draw the wrong conclusions because people are always much more complex than any set of assumptions we might make based on mere outward appearances.

As always, Egoyan’s use of music is fantastic and adds to the film’s emotional depth; visually the film is everything one would expect from his past work. His pristine scenes of aching beauty (set in the past), are always immediately accessible to at least one of the film’s characters along with the members of the audience. Egoyan’s imagery seems to represent a memory of something irretrievably lost, and its haunting, natural beauty reminds us of what is soon to be lost.

Egoyan doesn’t flatten his approach to topics even as touchy as terrorism into safe and tired formulas. He engages in a dialectic that takes in several current issues: the ethics of terrorism, the use and misuse of the internet as a forum for the exchange of information and misinformation, for impassioned debate and rabid diatribe, and how this technology influences and compresses our intense personal journeys (real or imagined) in a culture that is in constant fast-forward. Simon is a boy caught between two worlds and his fable evokes the nature of the internet as a whole; people construct personas based on who they want to be rather than who they are, disengage emotionally in their interactions with others in ways they never would in face-to-face interactions, act rather than react and use public spaces to work through private conflicts and issues.

Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter and now Adoration, demonstrate how much a film’s structure may be bent while remaining coherent and, more importantly, suggest new structures for films far removed from mere storytelling-films that are fragmented and elusive, and therefore a better reflection of how we know and feel about the real people in our lives, as opposed to fictional characters. While simple structures may be best for relating plots, something more complex is needed to relate character. As Egoyan himself has said, “There’s nothing simple about representing a human being.”

by Teri Carson