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Dir. Atom Egoyan
Rating: 8.5 | 0 User Reviews | Send to Friend
At last, a finely woven tale that doesn’t fray at the edges. Armenian-Canadian Atom Egoyan’s finest work since 1997's The Sweet Hereafter, the film marks the return of an indie auteur back on top of his game. The film artistically demonstrates the escalation of degeneration, the speed with which lies and insecurities can mushroom into chaos. Adoration is slightly akin to Paul Haggis' Crash as it begins in the thick of things, slowly unfurling and revealing its core in a captivating final half-hour. A number of tortuous lives converge, all meeting at the teenaged protagonist, Simon (Devon Bostick). He is orphaned at a young age and raised by his Uncle Tom (Scott Speedman), a tow truck driver clearing up everyone’s messes but his own. The multidimensional conspiracy blossoms when Simon’s teacher Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian, Egoyan’s wife) stokes the fire of self-sabotage, encouraging Simon to pass off a dramatic monologue performed before his class -- depicting his father as a terrorist who killed his mother -- as his true family history. There’s an exponential public reaction to the boy’s fabrications, which reach the world at large through viral videos. Simon becomes engrossed in the façade despite his misgivings about his parents’ actual car crash demise, the attention bolstering his still-morphing identity and self-worth. His teacher turns his fractured family story into a kind of performance art, an enticing mess of theater bleeding into reality and back again. At his best, Egoyan deftly delves through the dangerous depths of human feeling, the catacombs where many directors fear to tread, expertly inspecting psychological causation in most unexpectedly effective ways. The film manages to mine issues of fault, circumstance, personal origins, and religious self-sacrifice within the miniscule confines of one family. The result is jarringly intimate. Egoyan has viewers exactly where he wants them -- on a tight leash -- throughout the film, a film noir-type exercise in mystery not so much concerned with whodunit but why, exploring both the ethics of terrorism and the allure of becoming a victim, where lies are rooted in lonely desperation and the simple search for human connection overwhelms nearly everything else.
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