Atom Egoyan: ADORATION (2008)
Atom Egoyan: ADORATION
Of bombs and violins and web cams
Review by Chris Knipp
A boy tells a shocking lie, and it goes all over the Web. Somehow he uses the confusion he thus generates to explore his own identity and compensate for lost parents.
Though blessed with warm and human performances and armed with a shocking premise, Adoration is the quintessential think piece. There are potentially explosive events in more or less the present time, but the results are side-stepped or muted in order to focus on questions about religious conflict, guilt, and identity, among other things. The movie also sometimes becomes a rambling inquest, like Egoyan's memorable and celebrated The Sweet Hereafter. The latter hinges on the issue of what happened when a school bus ran off the road. Here there's a car crash whose causes are disturbingly ambiguous. And there's a young man who only knew his parents when he was very young. But unlike Sweet Hereafter, this time there are no answers forthcoming to any of the questions, only a chance perhaps of making peace with the past.
Things begin in a high school French class. Sabine, the teacher, played by Egoyan's muse and wife Arsinée Khanjian, reads the class an account in French of how Israeli security discovered a pregnant woman who arrived on a plane from the West with plastic explosives and a detonator in her handbag. She was expecting to meet her Arab boyfriend in a couple days and marry him there near Jerusalem. The boyfriend apparently meant to have her, their unborn child, and the 400-plus passengers die en route to Israel.
The students are supposed to submit a free translation of this news item. One boy, Simon (Devon Bostick), gets very creative indeed: he not only writes a version in which the would-be bomber and the pregnant fiancee are his own mother and father, but also puts out this tale as true on the Web and sets up a chat site where he discusses the pros and cons with online participants. These include outraged Jews, a Holocaust denier, a would-be terrorist, and miscellaneous argumentative teenagers, all of whom Simon observes and talks back to while playing with a pet mouse or munching on cereal in front of his Mac.
Sabine teaches drama as well as French and wants Simon to present his story as a monologue-performance at a drama festival. Simon insists on maintaining the fiction that his story is true. Sabine gets fired for advocating the promotion of such explosive material. But further details of how this whole situation would play out go unexplored. The focus shifts to Simon's actual family situation, in which Sabine appears to be more and more involved.
Simon's parents died a decade or so ago in a car crash and he has been raised by his uncle Tom (Scott Speedman), who drives a city tow truck and is strapped for money. Repeated odd encounters between Sabine and Tom follow. Tom's bossy, irascible, and racist father Morris, Simon's grandpa (Kenneth Welsh), has recently died, and there are scenes of Simon talking to the dying man and videotaping what he says. It's Christmastime, and Tom sets up a creche with flat figures beautifully designed and painted by his parents.
As the movie goes back and forth in time some of the events we see are happening only in Simon's mind. (It's not hard to keep these scenes straight, but they make the movie hovering and dreamy.) He imagines his parents if they were the bomber and the pregnant woman who flew to Israel unknowingly carrying a bomb. He also imagines their actual first meetings: his mother (Rachel Blanchard) was a violinist and Sami, his father (Noam Jenkins), was a violin maker. Sami evidently was Lebanese like Sabine (and Khanjian herself). Simon has his mother's violin, and Tom would like to sell it to pay debts. For Simon the violin becomes a key material link with his lost parents, particularly the top piece, the scroll, which his father changed on the original violin. The painted creche figures also assume a symbolic family significance in Simon's mind that isn't quite so clear.
At one point Sabine and Tom get into an altercation in a cafe with a taxi driver who threatens to throw up on them. This is about the only moment where Egoyan takes a break from his explorations of the themes like reality vs. fiction, moral responsibility, parenthood. These explorations wreck havoc on the narrative, which becomes more and more implausible, particularly in everything that concerns Sabine's role in events past and present. How are we to think of Simon's big lies? Are they justified by the debates they arouse? Egoyan just doesn't seem to care about working out the implications of the situations he has created.
Though "Jews" and "Jesus" are mentioned, "Muslims" or "Palestinians" are not. Egoyan wants to keep the focus broad enough to draw in other massacres and injustices, such as that of the Armenians from whom he is descended. Nothing is resolved and narrative strands are left dangling. What happened when it got out that Simon had invented the story? What was Sabine really up to? Was Simon's uncle really so hard up for money? This feels a bit like Haneke's Cache, but Egoyan lacks Haneke's ability to generate a sense of fear or outrage or his gift for stunning theatrical moments. However he uses his actors well. Khanjian has a way of chewing her words that's curiously appealing. Speedman has an unpredictable quality, the thing most needed here. As young Simon, Bostick projects calm and intelligence. He is the perfect "eye" of the piece.
This is one of Egoyan's most intriguing and appealing works, even though it's full of logical holes. Ultimately Scott Foundas of the Village Voice is right when he calls Adoration "a movie considerably more absorbing to talk, write, and think about afterward than it is to actually watch. " Maybe that's enough. But don't expect to feel excited or rewarded when the credits roll.
