A sense of deep loss and confusion hovers over Adoration, Atom Egoyan’s follow-up to his disappointing mainstream-courting Where the Truth Lies, which finds the director employing the gliding cinematography, sparse, mournful music, and splintered chronology of his earlier successes. Like The Sweet Hereafter, Egoyan’s latest pivots around a fatal car accident that directly affects both a community at large as well as, specifically, one family. Having lost his American mom (Rachel Blanchard) and Lebanese dad (Noam Jenkins) years earlier in a smash-up that his now-deceased bigoted grandfather (Kenneth Welsh) claimed was intentionally caused by his father, high-schooler Simon (Devon Bostick) lives in the custody of uncle Tom (Scott Speedman), a tow truck operator struggling to make ends meet and cope with the ingrained intolerance bestowed upon him by his father. Their lives are thrown into turmoil when, assigned by his French teacher Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian) to translate a news item about a pregnant woman whose fiancé secretly stowed explosives in her bag before boarding a plane for Israel, Simon instead passes off as true a version of the story in which he claims to be the couple’s child. Predictably, once Simon’s dramatic experiment hits the Internet, controversy and emotional chaos ensue.
Blending together past and present, reality and fiction, and straightforwardly shot material with cell phone and laptop-filtered imagery, Adoration attempts a ruminative meditation on a variety of issues, including cultural compatibility, the morality of terrorism, the nature of grief and victimhood, and the means by which identity is shaped by imagination and passed-down beliefs. An ambitious task, to be sure, and one that Egoyan isn’t fully capable of lucidly accomplishing, too prone is his script to expository declarations – mostly during Simon reading his counterfeit family story in front of class – and character behavior and plot revelations that seem at once puzzling and contrived. Sabine’s support for Simon’s ruse extends to her testing his uncle Tom’s tolerance for other cultures by posing as a cloaked Muslim neighbor, while Simon spends an inordinate amount of time engaging in, and listening to, online arguments about his (phony) terrorist parents made by classmates, their parents, and survivors of the actual near-disaster. They’re two of the many threads that Egoyan weaves into his multimedia tapestry, his film’s aesthetic delicacy and restraint (aided by Mychael Danna’s hauntingly melancholic string score) frequently at odds with his script’s overt attempts to provoke and edify.
If Egoyan’s elliptical narrative flirts with pretentiousness, the director nonetheless encases his action in an affecting mood of regret and longing, with Simon’s fictional tale coming to function as his means of working out pain and sorrow over his own mom and dad’s deaths. Likewise, Simon’s stunt instigates others to confront their pasts, and though the story eventually arrives at a surprise about Sabine’s true motivations that comes off as lamely artificial, Adoration finds grave poignancy in Tom’s concurrent attempts to come to grips with his father-fostered misery. That’s primarily thanks to Speedman, who – best known for his role on teen soap opera Felicity, and after impressive work in last year’s The Strangers – turns out to be the film’s true revelation. The guilt-ridden heartache spied in the corners of his hard eyes and the resentful sadness one can feel propelling his curt, angry outbursts, are both articulated with a subtlety and earnestness that cuts through Egoyan’s puzzle-box plot machinations to deliver jolts of authentic anguish, rage, and remorse.
