Adoration (2008)

Director:

Atom Egoyan

Writer:

Atom Egoyan (written by)

Release Date:

15 April 2009 (France)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

For his French-class assignment, a high school student weaves his family history in a news story involving terrorism, and goes on to invite an Internet audience in on the resulting controversy. |

Plot Keywords:

Controversy | High School | French Class | Terrorism | Class Project

Awards:

1 win & 3 nominations

Cast

Scott Speedman	...	Tom
Rachel Blanchard	...	Rachel
Kenneth Welsh	...	Morris
Devon Bostick	...	Simon
Aaron Poole
Dominic Cuzzocrea	...	Cab Driver
Katie Boland	...	Hannah
Noam Jenkins	...	Sami
Arsinée Khanjian	...	Sabine
Geraldine O'Rawe	...	Carole
Duane Murray	...	Parking Security
Hailee Sisera	...	Jennifer
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Maury Chaykin
Soo Garay	...	Anna / daughter
Ieva Lucs	...	Irate Woman

MPAA:

Rated R for language.

Runtime:

101 min | USA:100 min | France:100 min

Country:

Canada

Language:

English | French

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Certification:

USA:R | Netherlands:12 | Canada:14A (Alberta/Manitoba/Ontario) | Canada:G (Quebec) | Canada:PG (British Columbia) | Australia:M | Singapore:M18

Filming Locations:

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Company:

Ego Film Arts

Goofs:

Continuity: In the scene at the end of the film at his grandfather's empty lake house, Simon first unloaded the wooden Christmas figures from his duffel bag onto a pile of firewood on the dock. He then went into his grandfather's workshop and sawed the scroll off of his mother's violin. With his phone, he took a picture of the severed scroll in his hand with the dock in the background, but the dock was empty.

Interesting Dramatic Experiment

A teenager (Devon Bostick) who was orphaned after the tragic deaths of his parents is prompted by his teacher (Arsinee Khanjian) to deliver a fictional monologue about his father's failed terrorist act as fact in an elaborate "dramatic exercise" in Armenian-Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan's latest thought-provoking piece of abstraction "Adoration". As the fiction spins out of control over the internet, the true motives of those involved in the lie are revealed and back-stories come collapsing in on each other in Egoyan's signature elliptical style.

Egoyan, as always, gives patient viewers plenty to chew on. Like the young man's monologue that marries a true story to a false one about his parents, "Adoration" itself is an interesting dramatic experiment designed to provoke. It tackles many issues including the motives of terrorists, fractured familial relationships, the hollowness of alleged connections made through modern technology and the dangers of thinking those connections can replace real face-to-face human interaction. Though I always question Egoyan's motive in casting his wife Arsinee Khanjian in his films, in many ways, she gives her most understated and powerful performance here. Bostick does a decent job with a tough role, though Rachel Blanchard is curiously flat in the flashbacks as his mother. The true revelation is Scott Speedman as the troubled tow-truck driver who reluctantly steps in to raise his sister's son after she dies. His story arc proves to be the most involving, though one wishes his background had been more developed.

The bizarre detour into sleazy mediocrity with "Where the Truth Lies" seems to have made Egoyan a little rusty as he returns to a more familiar form here for those who have been watching the arc of his career. The elliptical folding in of the converging plot lines seems clumsier in "Adoration" than it did in his earlier works, and the "big reveal" comes a few scenes too early and sucks out the emotional impact. Unlike "Exotica" which had the swagger of a young auteur at the top of his game, or "The Sweet Hereafter" which came from the sublime source material of novelist Russell Banks, "Adoration" represents Egoyan bruised from years of wear left to his own devices. Though compelling, he gets the best of himself and let's the ideas take over the characters. He also relies far too much on visuals of non-characters in chat rooms or of people being recorded with cameras. However, Egoyan scores when Mychael Danna lends his musical compositions. The frequent collaborator does a magnificent job creating a haunting score with a recurring violin motif that plays integral to one of the back-stories.

Back in the late 1990's Atom Egoyan was in a league of his own and master of his own style. In the past ten years, however, international cinema has seen the emergence of filmmakers like Mexico's Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu ("Amores Perros", "21 Grams" and "Babel") and Germany's Fa-tih Akin (whose superb "The Edge of Heaven" deserved a bigger audience stateside last year). They often tackle similar themes in an elliptical Egoyanesque manner. But because their films are presented on a larger scale and infused with a certain energy and immediacy, Egoyan's films, in all their isolated scholarly austerity, have been unfairly left out in the cold. "Adoration" may not be Egoyan's best, but it proves he still has some good ideas in him and he isn't ready to be dismissed just yet.