Tricky Adoration Offers Some Delight
Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian) never meant things to go so far. A High School French teacher, she gave her students a translation exercise based on a real-life event involving a pregnant woman and the terrorist who secretly plants a bomb in her luggage and is also the father of her child.
Devon Bostick and Scott Speedman in Sony Pictures Classics' Adoration
It’s a complicated piece, and she just wanted to see if the class could follow its intricacies, never anticipating the effect it would have on Simon (Devon Bostick). In translating, he-re-imagines that news story is his own, never mind the fact his own parents concert violinist Rachel (Rachel Blanchard) and instrument restoration expert Sami (Noam Jenkins) died in tragic car crash.
An impressed Sabine, who is also the school’s drama teacher, urges Simon to continue the ruse and see and to craft a play based on the collective response. But the kid take things to an entirely unanticipated level, and soon he’s having web chats and conversations with people all over the world discussing the merits of his fictional father’s decision to unsuccessfully use his own wife and child as an explosive device.
Things soon spiral out of control and Sabine thinks she’s doing all she can to reign in the chaos. Simon’s uncle and caregiver Tom (Scott Speedman) isn’t so sure, wondering if there isn’t more to what is going on and the teacher’s reasons for planting its seeds than she cares to admit. At the center of the storm, though, is a young man, lost and searching, trying to find answers to a tragedy he frustratingly may never be privy to.
Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter, Exotica) has never made films all that easy to pigeonhole or describe. They are complicated animals, rooted in the contradictions and intricacies of the human condition. He does not shy away from stark truths or dark corners, each step of his narrative a layer of the onion pealing away to showcase a deeper need that could potentially rip its protagonists in two.
Such is the case with the director’s twelfth film Adoration. Little here is as it seems, people hiding secrets about themselves and their loved ones they either do not want to remember or cannot bring themselves to talk about. They are enigmas fighting their own duality, searching for reasons to go on when the world around them seems more than intent on beating them into battered submission.
As such, watching Egoyan’s latest in a constantly fascinating experience. It kept me on my toes and consistently off my guard, never quite knowing which way it was going to turn next or what sort of trickery it had hidden up its smoothly elegant working class sleeves. The film offers up a tidal wave of ebbs and flows, things deftly moving between past and present, truth and fiction, with magnetic ease.
If only the script were up to the same par as the filmmaking. Egoyan’s screenplay is too tricky by half, relying upon half-baked coincidences and leaps of faith on the viewer’s part that strain credibility. It also doesn’t spend near enough time on the repercussions involved with Simon’s charade, the fury of those at the tip of the lie relegate to one quick video chat confrontation that felt hardly genuine.
Still, there is so much to like about Adoration I have difficulty building any animosity towards the pieces that don’t quite connect. Speedman is the best I’ve ever seen him, while both Khanjian and Bostick manage to draw the attention every time they take to the screen. Paul Sarossy’s (Charlie Bartlett) is smoothly hypnotic, while the almost always reliable Mychael Danna (The Piano, Lakeview Terrace) turns in another of his patently ethereal scores.
I do not feel like this film showcases Egoyan at his very best. I had trouble with some of the logic, while the shifting identities of some of the players felt more like a narrative trick than it did an honest evolution of their characters.
But Adoration still offers many delights and asks probing questions few other pictures would dare to discuss. It is expertly acted and beautifully constructed, and for all its faux pas I was never once bored and remained constantly intrigued to discover where the director would lead me next. While I will not say it is without its faults its strengths far outweigh its minuses, the line between success and failure as the one separating Simon’s truths from his fiction.
Film Rating: êê1/2 (out of 4)
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