Adoration: Atom Egoyan's patchy puzzle of truths, lies, theatre and technology

Stories fold in upon stories in Adoration. How their contradictions speak to one another forms the backbone of the film. High schooler Simon (Devon Bostick) tells one to his class about how his father nearly succeeded in blowing up an aircraft with his pregnant mother onboard. We see the story play out in flashback, but is the fact that the Israeli airport’s lit like a moody upscale nightclub a splinter in the scene’s verity or merely an expression of some production designer’s caprices rubbing elbows with budget constraints? A woman shrouded in a beaded Islamic veil lurks in a wintry Toronto suburb, complimenting Simon’s bigoted tow-truck driving uncle Tom (Scott Speedman) on his nativity scene while inserting a baldly provocative statement about Jews into the already uncomfortable conversation. Is anything about her visit genuine? Is it some sort of theatre designed to elicit a violent response from Tom? Is she a particularly insistent tommyknocker clinging to Speedman after The Strangers?

Atom Egoyan’s latest finds the writer/director still immersed in the search for where the truth lies, still viewing families with a dissecting eye, still questioning our largely passive acceptance of ever-more invasive technologies, and, rather wearingly, still feeling obligated to plot his stories with a leaden dramaturgical hand. (In a sense Egoyan’s concerns mirror those of Michael Haneke, with the precarious advent of a certain sentimentality that urges resolutions Haneke wouldn’t even sniff at.) A crisp sense of artifice allowed Egoyan’s insistence on coincidence and the unlikely interconnectivity of characters and events to function relatively fluidly in his earliest features. But recent attempts at ostensibly more accessible stories with newly broader, more “globalized” casts of disparate characters—I’d vote for Ararat (2002) as the nadir, though Where the Truth Lies (05) makes a strong contestant—have mangled otherwise potentially interesting movies into overwrought tapestries, contributions to that self-important trend exemplified by Crash (04), Babel (06) and Crossing Over (09).

The good news is that Adoration is a major improvement on its immediate predecessors. Its metaphors are intelligent, labyrinthine and generative. And its creakier conceits are made somewhat more palatable through the sheer conviction of its better actors, namely Arsinée Khanjian, charged with embodying the movie’s most absurd protagonist, a loopy Lebanese-Canadian drama teacher who seems implausibly oblivious to how her audacious actions affect the rest of the world. Khanjian, eerily beautiful and a fixture in Egoyan’s films since Next of Kin (84), remains a beguiling, mysterious presence. She’s the best thing in Adoration, which provides her biggest role in an Egoyan film so far this millennium. If Speedman and Bostick fare less well it may simply be that you need to have married Egoyan to really grasp the vibe. The former seems deeply committed if confused about how to balance Tom’s burbling, inarticulate rage with his ability to adopt new perspectives. The latter may simply lack the preternatural understanding and emotional range required to pull off a truly difficult role—if it can be pulled off at all. And it’s not his fault that he looks like a catalogue model. He’s got a huge weight to carry here, and it’s a relief to see him do something neutral once in a while, like eat cereal.

Simon’s story sparks a highly emotional debate between students and faculty alike, putting his teacher and co-conspirator Sabine (Khanjian) in hot water and allowing Egoyan to explore the film’s thematic threads of the radical religious devotion and the limits of multiculturalism through a multiplicity of images. Egoyan refrains from excessive explicit editorializing with regards to Simon’s dependence on devices to contextualize his experiences, probably because the images say more than enough on their own. Simon interviews his dying grandfather with a video camera between them. He debates with others about his father’s supposed attempts at terrorism through the filter of videoconferencing, every speaker contained in their own little box glowing on the computer screen. Technology, especially screens within screens, grants Adoration the very sense of interconnectivity that some of the characters’ face-to-face encounters strain to convey. When Sabine’s car gets towed by Tom—she knows who he is; he has no idea who she is—we can hear the rusty wheels of dramatic irony churning away, though the payoff is that it does lead to one of the oddest impromptu diner lunch dates in recent memory, affectionately set in the now-closed and much-missed Canary Restaurant.

When darkness fails: On horror, The Strangers, terrific first acts, lousy endings, and using unlikable stars to your advantage

For all my problems with the movie—which you can read about here—I have to give Eden Lake some credit. It did manage to kinda stick to my ribs after I rented it a couple of weeks ago. It whetted my appetite for more new horror, and I found myself deciding to give writer/director Bryan Bertino’s debut The Strangers a whirl, despite my having this lingering memory of glancing at reviews from the time of its theatrical release last year that deemed it ridiculous. Well, ridiculous it certainly is, with far more creeping-up-behind-you moments than any movie can probably sustain, a few of those turgid scenes where the actors have nothing to do but flip out, cover their faces and say oh my god a dozen times, and risibly inconsistent antagonists, a zombie-like trio who wear these stupid masks for no apparent reason, who rarely talk, and when they do they sound like morons, and who seem to suffer from some serious short term memory loss, given how often they lose track of the whereabouts of our vulnerable, desperate heroes, a young couple trapped in a cottage in the woods. Still, I find myself in this position of, on one hand, wanting to completely write-off the movie for ultimately proving itself to be so dramatically soppy and, on the other, pondering the intricacies of its highly intriguing first act. I didn’t realize just how similar the set-ups were in Eden Lake and The Strangers when I rented the latter, but let me tell you, while Eden Lake is arguably the more effective chiller of the two, The Strangers has certain elements that if reapplied could still make for a very interesting movie.


Kristen (Liv Tyler) and James (Scott Speedman), like the protagonists of Eden Lake, venture into the woods for a romantic getaway during which the male of the couple plans to propose marriage. Unlike the unfolding of Eden Lake however, the proposal in The Strangers occurs before the couple arrive at their isolated locale. In fact, we only confirm the proposal’s occurrence in what is basically a flashback within a flashback, in a sequence of narrative fragments that serves to disarm the viewer quite effectively. And unlike the couple in Eden Lake, who seemed unambiguously in love with each other and ripe for tying the knot, essentially just tragic victims of circumstance, Kristen and James begin the story with the devastating realization that they’re not in agreement as to what they want from their relationship. Kristen, we discover, has turned James down, and in the same way that we can read the apocalyptic events of The Birds as being some sort of manifestation of Melanie Daniels’ perusal of Mitch Brenner, of the female protagonist’s sexual unconscious overwhelming that of the male’s, so can we read the horrific events that arise in The Strangers as being some similar manifestation of Kristen’s assertion of her desire to remain unwed and independent, of the intense discord it inflicts upon an event intended to be a celebratory confirmation of love and devotion.


I have to confess that I really don’t find Speedman a very appealing presence in movies. I won’t get into the quality of his acting abilities here, but, for the sake of my next point, let me just announce my entirely subjective distaste for the guy as a movie star. The point being that Speedman, for precisely the same reasons that he bugs me, is, for me at least, pretty much perfectly cast in The Strangers. James, having been freshly rejected, comes off as a truly oppressive boyfriend, one who grows only more oppressive with every ostensibly gentlemanly act he performs, such as his insistence that Kristen take the engagement ring he bought for her regardless of her refusal of marriage. He can’t take it back, he says, so she might as well have it. So gratingly paternal is James with Kristen that even when he’s about to leave the cottage to run an errand, he lights a fire for Kristen, as though she were incapable of doing it herself. The extent of his oppressiveness can be found even in the film’s setting itself: it’s his family’s cottage they’re going to spend the night in, full of his memories, placing him into an even greater position of power, power now essentially resigned to gloating resentment and annoying self pity. (And, to return to the movie’s dumbness, this old family cottage that seems to be uninhabited most of the time somehow has this amazing collection of contemporary music from the likes of Joanna Newsom, Gillian Welch, and Billy Bragg and Wilco, and not just on vinyl, but on 45!) No wonder Kristen doesn’t quite feel comfortable marrying this guy. He’s suffocating.


So a stranger turns up at the door, asking for somebody named Tamara. James leaves on his errand and while he’s gone the stranger returns and starts to torment Kristen, even penetrating the house without Kristen’s witnessing it, only to go back outside and knock on the door again. Go figure. James returns, the strangers multiply and get noisier and more insistent and there’s a predictable but nonetheless satisfying twist in how the first real act of violence plays out. So far so good, but it’s all downhill from there. So be it. But what about that first act? Is it me or is there something to it? It seems to be a prime example of the peculiar condition of the horror genre: while things are still ambiguous and the basic elements still falling into place, a horror movie can hold so much promise that that promise itself can, for some of us, actually make the movie worth watching. Even if the ending stinks. I’m imagining a film festival somewhere that only shows the first half-hour of horror movies. Afterwards audience members gather and discuss various endings that would often be superior to the actual endings. Who knows? Could be a hit.