Reason unmoored . . .
Added 11/4/2009
From first frame to last, I had no idea what was going to come next in this thought-provoking film from Canada. Others here may attempt to sum up the plot, but the dream-like, stream of conscious connections that lead from one scene to the next are what I found fascinating. The movement is back and forth in time, until it's hardly clear what the "present" is, while one assumption after another about characters and their motivations is turned on its head. What you think is true turns out to be only sort of so, and each revelation pulls you in even farther.
This is a movie for grown-ups, asking questions about the post-9/11 world we live in and wanting us to make sense of the fear and confusion around terrorism. Characters are not totally clear cut. A schoolboy, his teacher, his uncle, his grandfather, and his dead parents all draw our sympathy at times and then behave in ways that make us question their judgment.
Meanwhile, as a story about the boys' parents, which may or may not be true, explodes into chat rooms on the Internet, it ignites a fury of public discourse that takes on a manic life of its own. The social environment, as mediated by digital technology, becomes a kind of Bedlam, where reason becomes completely unmoored. Without giving too much away, the film finally finds a small respite of calm for its characters to regard each other with a degree of trust, while paranoia and pandemonium rage on around them. Well worth watching, "Adoration" portrays challenging ideas about the world we live in and argues for a measure of sanity to be found in connections between people who have little in common but their need to be at peace with each other.
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Egoyan's Smoothed Edges
Added 11/1/2009
What makes this film different from earlier Egoyan films is the
accessibility of this film. It seems some of Egoyan's rough
edges have been finally smoothed out. Gone, finally, are some
of the annoying self-conscious, self-artful and self-proclamatory
iconoclasm of The Adjuster and Exotica and Sweet Hereafter.
With each new film, Egoyan matures and lessens (thankfully not
all at once and so abruptly) some of the self-conscious film school
hokum that plagues his early films (particularly the Adjuster)
though not to the extent of rendering his earlier films
unwatchable or lacking in cinematic quality. This seems
to be a Canadian thing; I have noticed that David Cronenberg
has followed almost exactly the same trajectory in the maturation
of his films over time (and I am as much a big fan of Cronenberg
as I am Egoyan).
This film does rather insist that you try and dispense with
pre-conceived notions and prejudices and is one of the most
effective films in fact in presenting the thesis that the
'enemy' (e.g., Arabs, Muslims, etc.) are capable of humanity
and subtlety and intellectual accomplishment. What separates
this film from more transparent ideological films is that
this film tries to emphasize global humanity without subtracting
from any particular group or protagonist (or self-proclaimed
protagonist). If I had one criticism (without giving away
the whole plot), I might say that towards the end of the film,
I am not sure Egoyan is completely neutral and un-PC and does
seem to take sides with a pro-multiculturalism philosophy,
though in fairness to Egoyan I do not believe he takes ethnic
sides (in this film anyway) with any particular party to
the various conflicts in the Middle-East (one suspects
his vagabond Armenian background-having to move around
alot-and the precarious positions Armenians have sometimes
found themselves in the Middle-East, has greatly influenced
his political and social views-this film seems to play
some of these out, but in a subtle and non-judgemental way).
One CAN leave viewing this film maintaining one's prejudices
without having felt like they were ideologically assaulted from
opposing viewpoints because to his credit, Egoyan is asking us to
think and is not condescending to us in this film ("Agree with
me or you are an idiot..."-Are you listening Oliver Stone ?)
which in itself is rare among Directors. Kudos to Egoyan
in asking us to think but respecting us anyway, even if
we choose not to.
This film is especially well-edited, filmed, scored and
plotted even by the usual high standards of Egoyan films.
As I mentioned above, the film is more straightforward
than some of his earlier films which, like The Adjuster,
were terribly hokie and self-conscious. This film is not.
It is beautiful, well-acted, simple, artful and thoughtful
and well worth the cost of seeing it at the cinema
or purchasing the well-made DVD transfer.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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Typical provocative look at the nature of lying and storytelling from a master of the game
Added 10/23/2009
Simon, a high school student, reads an essay in English about his parents - his mother, a good and naive young woman; his father, a would-be-terrorist. The Israeli authorities, questioning the woman - his mother - pregnant with him, years before. Simon's teacher, Sabine, reading the story, in his French class, of a thwarted terrorist attack, the week before. Simon it turns out is turning this story into his own made-up autobiography. His parents are dead - a car accident? A deliberate accident on the part of his angry Muslim father who can't handle the prejudice in his family? Sabine...encouraging the boy to keep with the story of his parents, the terrorists, to pretend it's real, to shock his classmates, and later a community of professors and "survivors" of the plane that never exploded, the attack that never happened. Simon's uncle, Tom, who raised him, who hated his father, who took the child and brought him up in the city, not being able to afford it working his job as a tow-truck driver, wrestling with selling Simon's violin, inherited from his musician mother, to pay their debts. Sabine, insinuating herself into the Simon's life, and later his uncle's.... the grandfather, dead several months, a presence in recorded video, angry at his son-in-law for being a radical, angry at his son for not being more like him, angry at the world and at the truth...whatever it might be.
So in a nutshell is Atom Egoyan's latest, another foray into lies, deceptions, half-truths, difficult generational issues, ethnicity and religion and identity. It's tempting to say, been there, done that, and I can't deny that temptation. This is all pretty familiar ground for Egoyan, and I'm not entirely sure that he offers much of anything that is really new and interesting here to those who have seen his work before - though it might seem quite novel to those who haven't. It's less sexual in orientation, less "perverse" I guess you could say than EXOTICA which it most immediately calls to mind; it's fairly strongly concerned with video and the Internet and how they widen and broaden the aspects of truth- or lie-telling, as was his early feature SPEAKING PARTS, but it never quite goes into the dangerous psychological territories that film explored. The only really striking aspect for me in this film was in the character of the teacher Sabine (Egoyan's muse, wife, longtime lead actress Arsinée Khanjian) who is so confused and messed up that she hangs just a thread away from being a parody - but is roped into reality by the fierceness and intensity of Khanjian's performance, possibly the best I've seen from her. It's more often Egoyan's male characters that tread the thin line over the chasm of despair and madness but here it is the female teacher, full of secrets and never quite articulated desires who registers most powerfully.
As usual for the director, this has a strong feel for place (Toronto, mostly middle-class areas) and the characters all seem very self-aware - too much so, often. I'd like to see a stupid or even just an average, clueless character for once, actually. It's pretty bleak stuff throughout, with violence and terrorism and racial hatred simmering but never quite boiling over in many scenes, and depression and lost hopes and desires filling much of the remainder of the space. Khanjian as I said is terrific, and she and Scott Speedman as Tom really hold the film together - they're solid nearly all the way through so I really have to blame writer/director Egoyan for some of the stupider scenes, like one in which a taxi driver and Tom get into a ridiculously escalating argument seemingly just to make a plot point that has nothing to do with the scene. There were several uneven scenes, and as good as Khanjian is she just can't quite overcome her character's limitation as someone who's just wacky - or sane - enough for whatever the scene requires; then again, even the scenes that struck me ass "off" were disquieting in an interesting way - one wonders often just how messed-up the director might really be. I also had something of a problem with the really overbearing use of music - slow, dirgelike violin music through much of the film (by regular Egoyan collaborator Mychael Danna) and a couple of too-loud pop songs dominating a couple of late scenes. The fact that music is an underlying theme in the film perhaps helps to explain these choices, but still it seems to me that quiet would have been more appropriate at a few points, but was never allowed to exist.
All in all then a mixed bag. If you've seen a lot of Egoyan like I have you'll certainly be familiar with much of what you see - whether you think it's more interesting or carried off better than I did is another story. Worth a look overall; if I seem to be highlighting my criticisms, it's probably because I expect a lot from this great director, one of Canada's most significant film artists. Were we allowed half-stars, this would probably deserve 3 1/2; it's harder than most to rate, because conflicted and irritated as I was by much of it, I'm still thinking a good deal about it.
2 out of 2 people found this helpful.
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Reason unmoored . . .
Added 11/4/2009
From first frame to last, I had no idea what was going to come next in this thought-provoking film from Canada. Others here may attempt to sum up the plot, but the dream-like, stream of conscious connections that lead from one scene to the next are what I found fascinating. The movement is back and forth in time, until it's hardly clear what the "present" is, while one assumption after another about characters and their motivations is turned on its head. What you think is true turns out to be only sort of so, and each revelation pulls you in even farther.
This is a movie for grown-ups, asking questions about the post-9/11 world we live in and wanting us to make sense of the fear and confusion around terrorism. Characters are not totally clear cut. A schoolboy, his teacher, his uncle, his grandfather, and his dead parents all draw our sympathy at times and then behave in ways that make us question their judgment.
Meanwhile, as a story about the boys' parents, which may or may not be true, explodes into chat rooms on the Internet, it ignites a fury of public discourse that takes on a manic life of its own. The social environment, as mediated by digital technology, becomes a kind of Bedlam, where reason becomes completely unmoored. Without giving too much away, the film finally finds a small respite of calm for its characters to regard each other with a degree of trust, while paranoia and pandemonium rage on around them. Well worth watching, "Adoration" portrays challenging ideas about the world we live in and argues for a measure of sanity to be found in connections between people who have little in common but their need to be at peace with each other.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
Egoyan's Smoothed Edges
Added 11/1/2009
What makes this film different from earlier Egoyan films is the
accessibility of this film. It seems some of Egoyan's rough
edges have been finally smoothed out. Gone, finally, are some
of the annoying self-conscious, self-artful and self-proclamatory
iconoclasm of The Adjuster and Exotica and Sweet Hereafter.
With each new film, Egoyan matures and lessens (thankfully not
all at once and so abruptly) some of the self-conscious film school
hokum that plagues his early films (particularly the Adjuster)
though not to the extent of rendering his earlier films
unwatchable or lacking in cinematic quality. This seems
to be a Canadian thing; I have noticed that David Cronenberg
has followed almost exactly the same trajectory in the maturation
of his films over time (and I am as much a big fan of Cronenberg
as I am Egoyan).
This film does rather insist that you try and dispense with
pre-conceived notions and prejudices and is one of the most
effective films in fact in presenting the thesis that the
'enemy' (e.g., Arabs, Muslims, etc.) are capable of humanity
and subtlety and intellectual accomplishment. What separates
this film from more transparent ideological films is that
this film tries to emphasize global humanity without subtracting
from any particular group or protagonist (or self-proclaimed
protagonist). If I had one criticism (without giving away
the whole plot), I might say that towards the end of the film,
I am not sure Egoyan is completely neutral and un-PC and does
seem to take sides with a pro-multiculturalism philosophy,
though in fairness to Egoyan I do not believe he takes ethnic
sides (in this film anyway) with any particular party to
the various conflicts in the Middle-East (one suspects
his vagabond Armenian background-having to move around
alot-and the precarious positions Armenians have sometimes
found themselves in the Middle-East, has greatly influenced
his political and social views-this film seems to play
some of these out, but in a subtle and non-judgemental way).
One CAN leave viewing this film maintaining one's prejudices
without having felt like they were ideologically assaulted from
opposing viewpoints because to his credit, Egoyan is asking us to
think and is not condescending to us in this film ("Agree with
me or you are an idiot..."-Are you listening Oliver Stone ?)
which in itself is rare among Directors. Kudos to Egoyan
in asking us to think but respecting us anyway, even if
we choose not to.
This film is especially well-edited, filmed, scored and
plotted even by the usual high standards of Egoyan films.
As I mentioned above, the film is more straightforward
than some of his earlier films which, like The Adjuster,
were terribly hokie and self-conscious. This film is not.
It is beautiful, well-acted, simple, artful and thoughtful
and well worth the cost of seeing it at the cinema
or purchasing the well-made DVD transfer.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
Typical provocative look at the nature of lying and storytelling from a master of the game
Added 10/23/2009
Simon, a high school student, reads an essay in English about his parents - his mother, a good and naive young woman; his father, a would-be-terrorist. The Israeli authorities, questioning the woman - his mother - pregnant with him, years before. Simon's teacher, Sabine, reading the story, in his French class, of a thwarted terrorist attack, the week before. Simon it turns out is turning this story into his own made-up autobiography. His parents are dead - a car accident? A deliberate accident on the part of his angry Muslim father who can't handle the prejudice in his family? Sabine...encouraging the boy to keep with the story of his parents, the terrorists, to pretend it's real, to shock his classmates, and later a community of professors and "survivors" of the plane that never exploded, the attack that never happened. Simon's uncle, Tom, who raised him, who hated his father, who took the child and brought him up in the city, not being able to afford it working his job as a tow-truck driver, wrestling with selling Simon's violin, inherited from his musician mother, to pay their debts. Sabine, insinuating herself into the Simon's life, and later his uncle's.... the grandfather, dead several months, a presence in recorded video, angry at his son-in-law for being a radical, angry at his son for not being more like him, angry at the world and at the truth...whatever it might be.
So in a nutshell is Atom Egoyan's latest, another foray into lies, deceptions, half-truths, difficult generational issues, ethnicity and religion and identity. It's tempting to say, been there, done that, and I can't deny that temptation. This is all pretty familiar ground for Egoyan, and I'm not entirely sure that he offers much of anything that is really new and interesting here to those who have seen his work before - though it might seem quite novel to those who haven't. It's less sexual in orientation, less "perverse" I guess you could say than EXOTICA which it most immediately calls to mind; it's fairly strongly concerned with video and the Internet and how they widen and broaden the aspects of truth- or lie-telling, as was his early feature SPEAKING PARTS, but it never quite goes into the dangerous psychological territories that film explored. The only really striking aspect for me in this film was in the character of the teacher Sabine (Egoyan's muse, wife, longtime lead actress Arsinée Khanjian) who is so confused and messed up that she hangs just a thread away from being a parody - but is roped into reality by the fierceness and intensity of Khanjian's performance, possibly the best I've seen from her. It's more often Egoyan's male characters that tread the thin line over the chasm of despair and madness but here it is the female teacher, full of secrets and never quite articulated desires who registers most powerfully.
As usual for the director, this has a strong feel for place (Toronto, mostly middle-class areas) and the characters all seem very self-aware - too much so, often. I'd like to see a stupid or even just an average, clueless character for once, actually. It's pretty bleak stuff throughout, with violence and terrorism and racial hatred simmering but never quite boiling over in many scenes, and depression and lost hopes and desires filling much of the remainder of the space. Khanjian as I said is terrific, and she and Scott Speedman as Tom really hold the film together - they're solid nearly all the way through so I really have to blame writer/director Egoyan for some of the stupider scenes, like one in which a taxi driver and Tom get into a ridiculously escalating argument seemingly just to make a plot point that has nothing to do with the scene. There were several uneven scenes, and as good as Khanjian is she just can't quite overcome her character's limitation as someone who's just wacky - or sane - enough for whatever the scene requires; then again, even the scenes that struck me ass "off" were disquieting in an interesting way - one wonders often just how messed-up the director might really be. I also had something of a problem with the really overbearing use of music - slow, dirgelike violin music through much of the film (by regular Egoyan collaborator Mychael Danna) and a couple of too-loud pop songs dominating a couple of late scenes. The fact that music is an underlying theme in the film perhaps helps to explain these choices, but still it seems to me that quiet would have been more appropriate at a few points, but was never allowed to exist.
All in all then a mixed bag. If you've seen a lot of Egoyan like I have you'll certainly be familiar with much of what you see - whether you think it's more interesting or carried off better than I did is another story. Worth a look overall; if I seem to be highlighting my criticisms, it's probably because I expect a lot from this great director, one of Canada's most significant film artists. Were we allowed half-stars, this would probably deserve 3 1/2; it's harder than most to rate, because conflicted and irritated as I was by much of it, I'm still thinking a good deal about it.
2 out of 2 people found this helpful.
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