Examination of deceit in ‘Adoration’ is worthwhile but baffling

Detroit Free Press (Detroit, Michigan)
July 17, 2009

BY ROGER MOORE, ORLANDO SENTINEL

Canadian director Atom Egoyan is most at home wrapping delicate
mysteries of fate inside mournful elegies, but in recent years, he has
strayed from the style and sort of story that made him famous. His
restlessness has led him to risk obscurity ("Ararat," "Citadel") and
ridicule ("Where the Truth Lies").

Egoyan returns to his "The Sweet Hereafter" (1997) comfort zone with
"Adoration," a gimmicky, sad and beautifully acted mystery that keeps
its secrets even when it loses its grasp of the logical.

Simon (Devon Bostick), a Toronto teen, listens with growing agitation
as his French teacher reads a famous news account of a mass murder
that was narrowly averted by Israeli airport security. A pregnant
woman about to board a plane for the Holy Land was stopped when a bomb
was found in her purse. Her Palestinian lover had planted it and
packed her off, sentencing her and his unborn child to death.

Simon doesn’t translate the article, as assigned, but instead writes a
biographical essay. He was the unborn child, he writes. If his father
had succeeded,

Simon would not exist, and hundreds would have died. Simon’s tale
rivets his classmates, who tie up his evenings with Web arguments over
truth, prejudice and bad parenting.

His teacher, played by Egoyan’s wife, Arsinee Khanjian, doubles as
drama director. She is fascinated by the object lesson she sees this
story teaching the class. She’s also intrigued by how it tests the
tolerance of the kids’ parents.

The only problem? It’s not true. We learn that the teacher has
embraced and encouraged this charade. Over the course of the film —
told in flashbacks to that day at the airport, to Simon’s real-life
past, his relationship to his late grandfather and his current
difficulties with his uncle — we struggle with truth and drama,
voyeuristically peeking in on this revealing lie and its far-reaching
consequences lin solos dominate the score. Her violin is a piece of
the puzzle, which Egoyan is more interested in complicating than
solving.

But as lovely and thought-provoking as "Adoration" is, the
coincidences, illogical behavior and the baffling acts by the teacher
are so jarring that it’s easy to get lost trying to explain her
motivations.

Egoyan certainly did.

Additional Facts
‘Adoration’
Three out of four stars
Rated R; language
1 hour, 40 minutes

01/907170301/1035/rss04

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress