Adoration
Studio: Sony Pictures Classics
Rated: R
Cast: Rachel Blanchard, Scott Speedman, Katie Boland, Arsinee Khanjian, Raoul Bhaneja
Director: Atom Egoyan
WorkNameSort: Adoration
Our Rating: 2.00
Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan’s new film, Adoration, takes a look at an escalating series of intertwined dumb moves on the part of a couple of smart adults and one kid who should know better, then unravels to reveal how those idiotic judgments were informed by noble emotions. Does that justify what happens? Not when a high- schooler’s future depends on it. But try telling that to these highly self-involved puppets of love’s proscenium arch.
Saw survivor Devon Bostick plays Simon, an eloquent and dark student in a French class led by the progressive-minded Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian), who reads her class a story about a Middle Eastern man, his pregnant American wife and his plot to destroy an airplane headed for Israel. Simon’s interest is piqued and he asks Sabine if he can write the fictional story as if it were true, as if he himself were the couple’s unborn American baby. Sabine, taken with Simon for reasons unclear but possibly inappropriate, agrees.
That’s not necessarily a dumb decision; Simon proves to be a promising, intuitive writer and Sabine brings out the best in him. Later, Simon asks to present the essay to the school and, again, not as a fictional work. His parents really died, he argues, and according to his dying grandfather, his Middle Eastern father was a real killer. So it’s close enough, right? Sabine gives her blessing, and there’s your big dumb move. Simon’s uncle, played by Scott Speedman with a down-to-earth exasperation that mirrors the audience’s, is left to pick up the pieces once Simon (who we’ve established makes dumb choices) posts his essay online.
As with most Egoyan films, the whole charade would be intolerable if the writer-director didn’t treat his characters with such love. He takes joy in presenting people who could use a kick in the ass, then letting us do the mental kicking. Afterward, he explains their motivations with a patriarchal gentleness that never excuses, but allows for forgiveness.
One of the main framing devices in Adoration is a form of Skype Internet conferencing, a kind of real-time video chat where Simon interacts with dozens of his schoolmates and other kids presumably from around the country.
Simon gauges the reactions to his lie and offers justification from several points of view, antagonizing and engaging his peers to think outside their comfort zones. Egoyan seems invigorated by these sequences, which are so far away from the melodrama everywhere else in the picture.
With the students’ impassioned, seemingly improvised reactions, he shows us that society’s future, despite what’s presented on MTV, may be in good hands. The teens here are bitingly perceptive and unabashedly curious, and they listen to each other.
I suspect that the Skyping teens in this movie would roll their eyes at what’s going on around them; Egoyan’s ham-fisted commentaries on religion, terrorism and xenophobia are so needy they make Crash perpetrator Paul Haggis look subtle, and Simon’s journey of self-discovery is stunted compared to his obviously high maturity level ‘ he might better use his time figuring out how he’s going to get into college now that the adults in his life have so thoroughly steered him wrong, instead of moping about a cello and bemoaning racism in his family.
For all their brooding, these kids are all right. It’s the grown-ups who need an attitude adjustment.
This article appears in Jul 15-21, 2009.