Movie Review: “Adoration”
Rating: 77
Atom Egoyan’s films are often about the ripples after impact, the dull pain left in the wake of tragedy. In “Adoration,” multiple psychic wounds — the loss of parents, spouses and siblings — come to bear on a bright teenager who might not deserve all this pressure, but invites it all because so few of his life questions have answers.
Simon (Devon Bostick) lost his beloved parents five years before, and now lives with his rudderless Uncle Tom (Scott Speedman) in Toronto, haunted by their deaths. The official word is that his classical violinist mother Rachel (Rachel Blanchard) and his father Sami (Noam Jenkins) were killed in a car accident, but the still-seething racial hatred of his dying grandfather (Kenneth Welsh) muddies the waters with insistence that Sami, a Palestinian, killed Rachel.
A high school French assignment intensifies Simon’s internal conflict. When the class is asked to translate an old news story about a terrorist attack in which a pregnant woman is forced by her Arab husband to carry a bomb onto an Israel-bound plane, Simon inserts his parents into the story. This intrigues his teacher Sabine (Arsinee Khanjian, Egoyan’s wife), who asks Simon to do a dramatic reading of his interpretation.
For all Simon knows, it could be true. His reading becomes a point of interest and conflict in his community, especially in online chatrooms where Simon’s classmates gather and debate the story alongside survivors of the crash and venom-spewing anti-Semites. To complicate matters further, Sabine is fired for overstepping the bounds of teaching with the assignment, and her interest in Simon and Tom is too intense for comfort.
To his credit, Egoyan spends much of “Adoration” deliberately confusing the audience — Sami and Rachel are portrayed as both the parents Simon knew and as the attackers they may or may not have been. This, along with the rising community conflict surrounding Simon’s story, cultivates a slow-burn tension around the teenager.
While “Adoration” is filled with great performances, the standout might be Speedman, the former “Felicity” actor who plays Tom as a man whose life was clearly derailed by his sister’s death and stained by the dark blotch of his father’s racism. His life was cast adrift by the event, and Speedman’s dark-hued performance is central to Egoyan’s message in “Adoration”: that sorrow and anger embeds itself, and the past can flare back up at any time.
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Saw it last night. We were the only ones in the theater.
The movie was great. I liked it better than crash or Babel.