Every passing year, it feels like Hollywood is engaged in an ongoing competition banking on who can make their audience think less. Ironically, as American cinema gets further away from the days of the big studio assembly lines, the movies opening across the country come off more like products and less like films.
Rest assured, though, there are still thinkers and believers working in the movie business – filmmakers who wouldn’t dare pander to their audiences. You definitely don’t need to go all the way to Canada to find such a filmmaker, but after a quarter-century of feature film work, Atom Egoyan has become a shining example of what it means to be a truly independent director.
He’s had his ups and downs – his film Where the Truth Lies made headlines over its rating issues with the MPAA, only to get critically dismantled at the time of its release. But the mind behind the criminally underappreciated The Sweet Hereafter is back in fighting form with Adoration, a textured exploration of identity, terrorism and victimization in the Internet age.
The film, presented in non-linear Egoyan fashion, is almost too much to digest in one viewing. In an interview with The Diamondback, the director spoke with complete faith in the audience’s ability to piece together the narrative.
“I have a really high expectation of my viewer,” Egoyan said. “I want them both to trust me and be suspicious of me at the same time.
“Narrative film can actually aspire to the same challenges as literature can, and that’s been the defining aspect of the films I’ve been raised with and cherished. And I see myself as extending that school.”
On first viewing, Adoration plays the middle ground between what is real and what is imagined. At the suggestion of his French teacher (Egoyan’s wife Arsinée Khanjian, Where the Truth Lies), Simon (Devon Bostick, Saw IV) tells his class the story of how his father (Noam Jenkins, Saw IV) tried to put his pregnant mother (the angelic Rachel Blanchard, Careless) on a plane to Israel with a bomb in her luggage.
Raised by his uncle (Scott Speedman, Anamorph, in a very natural performance), Simon uses the tale of his almost death-before-birth as a way of explaining his grandfather’s (Ken Walsh, Kit Kittredge: An American Girl) malice toward his father. Egoyan said he thought it was unusual to use a terrorist event – loosely based on a true story – to serve as the background to a more personal story.
“I think some people might find that really shocking and provocative, which is why it’s the type of film that is,” he said. “I don’t think it’s the type of film that exists in the mainstream culture.
“Because in this case … it’s an act that never occurs. That bomb did not go off. And I think that section where we see that community of people mourning an accident or a catastrophe that didn’t happen – there’s something absurd about that, yet tangible because people can relate to being a victim.”
The debate explodes out of the classroom and into the video chat rooms. What starts as a discussion between friends and classmates expands out to parents, community members and, eventually, fanatics. What at first was an acceptable outlet for Simon’s identity crisis becomes a dangerous source of obsession.
“These people don’t know who he his and there’s nothing related to what it is he’s looking for,” Egoyan said. “And he can be diverted by that, watch it and tune into it for a while, but ultimately, the film charges that he has to still negotiate in the physical world. He has to actually come to terms with these objects that have been placed around him that he has to now redefine.”
There are many striking images throughout Adoration, all married to Mychael Danna’s aching score. Perhaps the one that sticks out most, thematically and visually, is one of the later shots of Simon’s grandfather. His image – recorded on a digital camera – melts slowly and fades away in a pixelated mess, charred by the flames of a bonfire.
“I think that’s one of the issues the film raises,” Egoyan said. “If we want things that are going to be generally transformative, we still have to relate to a physical space, I think, as opposed to just a digital world.”
Adoration will open in Washington on May 29.
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