Adoration (Blu-ray)
APPROX. 101 MINS. - PROD. YEAR: 2008 - MPA RATING: R
" Feels like an exercise film, the kind of cinematic monologue one might produce for an assignment not unlike the story that the young hero concocts.
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As is so often the case, in Atom Egoyan's "Adoration" it all comes down to the teacher. And just as the French teacher in this drama makes a questionable decision and pays the price, so does Egoyan in crafting this all-important character. The only difference is, it's viewers who pay the price--viewers who expect more, but are left with substantial questions while the writer-producer-director seems more concerned with style.
"Adoration" is one of those serious dramas that invites viewers to try to piece together a deliberately fragmented narrative puzzle. Simon (Devon Bostick) is a student in a Toronto high school who is as serious as the tone of this film. No one smiles, no one jokes, no one has awkward moments, playful moments, or moments when their guard is down. Everyone has the same serious tone about them, and in a strange way it makes this film seem less than 3-dimensional, right from the start.
Simon lost both his parents in a car accident a long time ago, and we see him filming his grandfather in a hospital bed as Granddad talks about his mother and father, intercut with shots of Simon reading a paper about his parents to his high school French class. Never mind that no French is spoken, which is hard enough to believe. As Simon reads about his terrorist father and violinist mother we're supposed to wonder what happened. But there are other questions that intrude. Like, why is the teacher pushing him, and only him, to do this "exercise"? Almost as if Egoyan knew that it made no sense to have a French teacher pushing someone to do a monologue in English that's totally unrelated to the class curriculum, we're told, as almost an afterthought, that Sabine (Arsinee Khanjian) is also the drama teacher. Okay, so then why doesn't this take place in a drama class, or why don't we see this other side of her? Worse, what would possess this woman to take such an interest in Simon that she decides to "prove" something to him about his uncle by dressing in Middle Eastern garb with a hood and elaborate silver coin-and-mail veil and pretending to be a Muslim living in the area? While Egoyan is trying very hard to create a stylish drama with music and fragmentation and revisited narrative segments forming the main focus, questions like these make it difficult to focus on Egoyan's "mystery."
Another problem surfaces with the character of Simon's uncle. After Egoyan goes to seemingly great pains to make the point that the Uncle is irresponsible--with all of this coming from the grandfather's mouth--we learn not too long afterward that the boy had gone to live with his Uncle Tom (Scott Speedman) from the time that he became an orphan. This makes the grandfather a potential unreliable narrator, and while that in itself--the notion of unreliability invested in multiple characters--is a very intriguing one, Egoyan doesn't quite pull it off, again, because of nagging peripheral questions. In the case of the uncle, we never see a shred of irresponsibility in his actions, nor any tension to speak of between him and the boy. This, then, is the mystery that we wonder about every bit as much as the one that Egoyan would have us ponder: what really happened with Simon's parents, and what's the effect of making up a story in this Internet age? The latter, of course, isn't much of a question at all. It's a foregone conclusion. Everyone knows the power of the Internet to spread information and misinformation, and so the monologues of different people responding in "Brady Bunch" squares on Simon's computer is more tedious than it is intriguing.
As a mystery, "Adoration" is plodding, mostly because the issues of what happened with the boy's parents and what's really true about all of the scenes we've been watching has an artificial sense of forward movement, with no significant rising and falling action. There are precious few "mini-climaxes" to make the narrative arc crest in spots, and the gradual reveals that make movies like this work are either lacking or inconsequential.
