Cinematical, CA
May 24 2008

Cannes Review: Adoration

Posted May 24th 2008 9:32AM by Kim Voynar

Adoration, the newest film by critically acclaimed filmmaker Atom
Egoyan, is a beautifully evocative film, though some may find its
convoluted storyline distracting. In many respects, the film very much
evokes one of my favorite films, The Sweet Hereafter, Egoyan’s 1997
Palm d’Or winner. Where The Sweet Hereafter dealt with the impact of
guilt and grief in a small community following a tragic school bus
accident, in Adoration Egoyan deals with grief and loss on a more
personal level, while also blending in ideas about the subjective
nature of reality and identity in a technological age. In a world
where who we are can be invented, reinvented, and broadcast to the
world via chat rooms and virtual reality avatars, can we ever really
know another person — or even ourselves?

The story centers on a young boy, Simon, (Devon Bostick), who, while
completing a school assignment translating a newspaper story about a
man who planted a bomb on his pregnant girlfriend, spontaneously
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 innocents on a flight to Israel.

Simon’s French teacher, Sabine (Egoyan’s wife, Arsinée Kanjian) who
also teaches drama, 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, though, 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 into his story and react to it.

The performances in the film are excellent, but Scott Speedman
(Underworld), who plays Simon’s Uncle Tom, who’s raised his nephew
since his parents died, surprises here with a particularly thoughtful
and restrained portrayal of a man troubled by unresolved family
history. Tom’s a man who’s filled with a dark rage always simmering
just below the surface, threatening to explode upon the nearest
target. Bostick is also great; the 16-year-old has an intense,
intelligent screen presence beyond his years, and I’ll be watching to
see what he does in the future.

Visually, the film is everything one would expect from an Egoyan film;
it’s shot by Paul Sarossy, who also shot The Sweet Hereafter and
Exotica (along with many other films), and it’s perfectly framed and
crisply shot. Egoyan’s script is thoughtful, smart, and layered with
issues and imagery. I expect the critical divide on the film to fall
mostly into the camps of those who love Egoyan’s work and those who
don’t. Some find him obtuse and overly intellectual; I like the
chances he takes with his films, and his unique way of examining the
mundane and tying it to larger issues, and he does that very well in
Adoration.

The use of music is fantastic; Simon’s mother was a violinist, and his
parents met when his mother brought in her violin to be repaired by
his father. Mychael Danna, who scored Egoyan’s previous films (along
with many other films including Little Miss Sunshine and Monsoon
Wedding) uses violin music extensively, adding to the film’s emotional
depth.

The film shifts back and forth both in time and in Simon’s real
memories of his parents juxtaposed against his imagined history as the
child of the couple in the story. Rachel Blanchard and Noam Jenkins
play the parents in both versions, so you have to pay attention to
what’s real and what’s not. The scenes with Sami and Rachel were shot
with a long lens, giving them a soft, dreamy air that visually
separates them from the scenes set in the present.

Egoyan uses the technology of internet chat rooms to look at how we
define ourselves by our personal histories, real or imagined. Simon
uses his storytelling to work through his own doubts about the death’s
of his parents some years earlier in a car accident, and secrets he
doesn’t understand about his family history and dynamic, but he
doesn’t consider the greater impact his masquerade might have on
others.

In a way, Simon’s fable evokes the nature of the internet as a whole;
people create 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, and act rather
than react. While Egoyan doesn’t out-and-out disdain technology in
this film, he is questioning the way the internet can take the
humanity out of human interaction, as people use public spaces to work
through private conflicts and issues.

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