"In Modernism, reality used to validate media. In Postmodernism, media validates reality. If you don't believe this, just think how many times you've described some real event as being 'just like a movie'." - Brad Holland
By now we're familiar with the Atom Egoyan formula. The majority of his films revolve around some traumatic past event, his casts gradually piecing together the past until some cohesive truth is revealed. These films are comprised of seemingly disconnected sequences and seemingly unrelated characters, vignettes that only begin to gel and come together in some revelatory climax.
These films also switch between eras, their narratives jumping from past to present to future, until history is concretized and the traumatic event is resolved in the present. Entwined with this search for truth will also be a study of media, how truth changes with context, the blurring of fact and fiction and a story which unfolds both in real life, and in some other form, often a film within the film, stage performance, school play etc. Virtually all of Egoyan's films adopt this narrative structure, which seems to blend a modernist search for truth with a decidedly postmodern admittance that truth requires the careful sorting of both testimonials and subjectivity.
"Adoration" is the story of an orphaned boy who is encouraged by his teacher to invent a story about his parents. He concocts a fictional account of his father planting a bomb in his mother's suitcase to perpetrate a terrorist attack, then takes his story to the internet, where audiences perceive it as being real, and discuss the various moral and wider implications of the tale. The film then progresses along two narrative streams – the first being the real story of the boy, whose parents were actually killed in a car accident, the second being the invented story about the planted bomb.
Like Egoyan's "Ararat" (it also strongly resembles his 1987 film, "Family Viewing"), "Adoration" slowly turns into a kaleidoscopic rumination, this time of voyeurism, the totems of history, the ethics of terrorism, the obfuscation caused by technology, and various post 9/11 questions of racism, fear, paranoia etc. "Adoration" is very didactic, and not as smart as Egoyan thinks it is, but Egoyan's elegance and the fact that the film is framed as a "lesson" being taught to a student, helps dilute the film's preachy tone.
If the film's walking mouthpieces at times get annoying, Egoyan's cast of characters nevertheless work well on the level of allegory. Peel away the distractions and what you ultimately have is a drama in which a crumbling figure of white privilege and patriarchal power clings so steadfastly to religious systems, false wisdom and outdated values that a middle eastern man and his wife are sent to their deaths. Significantly, they die in a car crash which resembles the head on collisions of suicidal dive bombers. The crash itself is caused by "not seeing" and by being "distracted by symbolic totems". Like Egoyan's "The Sweet Hereafter", the film's central concern is determining who is responsible for the crash, and whether the crash is an act of murder, terrorism, accident or something more.
Living in the wreckage of these deaths are the wife's brother (a tow truck driver, symbolically always carrying his sister's wreckage), son, and the father's ex wife, all of whom have to learn a lesson. This lesson (taught to them by the boy's teacher) is provoked by the student's fictional account of his father's death, in which his father changes from a terrorist, and his mother a hapless victim, to human beings once again. At this point the son (who symbolises the children of our internet future) then burns all ties with his grandfather and embraces a new form of adoration or humanity, the film's title revealed to be a cautionary message: be careful what and who you revere and adore, question what you've been taught to believe and be wary of the power that false ideas have on people's imagination and beliefs.
Speaking of the film, Egoyan says: "Religious systems have lost their value. Indicators, markers and sacred objects have lost their meaning. And this kid has to reorganise them, has to go back to the original scrolls, if you will, has to go back to his grandmother's place, has to go back to his father's ancient scroll of the violin and understand what it was intended to be and reformat that in the real world and stop just receiving this wisdom from other people."
Egoyan's use of the word "reformat" is interesting in light of a filmography which often deals (somewhat superficially) with the influence of media and technology on memory and ideology. What the hug-a-terrorist narrative of "Adoration" suggests is not only that the internet is all about immediate and spontaneous emotion and gratification, a landscape which is unable to ever provide catharsis, but that life is inherently infected with a kind of confusion which can only be made sense of by networks and trawler-like search engines. Once you find what you're looking for, and deem it worthwhile, ditch the rest. Reformat and start rebuilding.
The film ends with old families and family ties collapsing and new family ties being forged, a kind of multinational new community, all boundaries broken, in which a Lebanese woman, step-mom, mixed race son and Canadian man wipe the slate clean and start over, ironically, in a room full of a dangerously selective past.
8/10 – Though heavily flawed, this is Egoyan's best film since "Exotica" and "The Sweet Hereafter". Worth one viewing.
By now we're familiar with the Atom Egoyan formula. The majority of his films revolve around some traumatic past event, his casts gradually piecing together the past until some cohesive truth is revealed. These films are comprised of seemingly disconnected sequences and seemingly unrelated characters, vignettes that only begin to gel and come together in some revelatory climax.
These films also switch between eras, their narratives jumping from past to present to future, until history is concretized and the traumatic event is resolved in the present. Entwined with this search for truth will also be a study of media, how truth changes with context, the blurring of fact and fiction and a story which unfolds both in real life, and in some other form, often a film within the film, stage performance, school play etc. Virtually all of Egoyan's films adopt this narrative structure, which seems to blend a modernist search for truth with a decidedly postmodern admittance that truth requires the careful sorting of both testimonials and subjectivity.
"Adoration" is the story of an orphaned boy who is encouraged by his teacher to invent a story about his parents. He concocts a fictional account of his father planting a bomb in his mother's suitcase to perpetrate a terrorist attack, then takes his story to the internet, where audiences perceive it as being real, and discuss the various moral and wider implications of the tale. The film then progresses along two narrative streams – the first being the real story of the boy, whose parents were actually killed in a car accident, the second being the invented story about the planted bomb.
Like Egoyan's "Ararat" (it also strongly resembles his 1987 film, "Family Viewing"), "Adoration" slowly turns into a kaleidoscopic rumination, this time of voyeurism, the totems of history, the ethics of terrorism, the obfuscation caused by technology, and various post 9/11 questions of racism, fear, paranoia etc. "Adoration" is very didactic, and not as smart as Egoyan thinks it is, but Egoyan's elegance and the fact that the film is framed as a "lesson" being taught to a student, helps dilute the film's preachy tone.
If the film's walking mouthpieces at times get annoying, Egoyan's cast of characters nevertheless work well on the level of allegory. Peel away the distractions and what you ultimately have is a drama in which a crumbling figure of white privilege and patriarchal power clings so steadfastly to religious systems, false wisdom and outdated values that a middle eastern man and his wife are sent to their deaths. Significantly, they die in a car crash which resembles the head on collisions of suicidal dive bombers. The crash itself is caused by "not seeing" and by being "distracted by symbolic totems". Like Egoyan's "The Sweet Hereafter", the film's central concern is determining who is responsible for the crash, and whether the crash is an act of murder, terrorism, accident or something more.
Living in the wreckage of these deaths are the wife's brother (a tow truck driver, symbolically always carrying his sister's wreckage), son, and the father's ex wife, all of whom have to learn a lesson. This lesson (taught to them by the boy's teacher) is provoked by the student's fictional account of his father's death, in which his father changes from a terrorist, and his mother a hapless victim, to human beings once again. At this point the son (who symbolises the children of our internet future) then burns all ties with his grandfather and embraces a new form of adoration or humanity, the film's title revealed to be a cautionary message: be careful what and who you revere and adore, question what you've been taught to believe and be wary of the power that false ideas have on people's imagination and beliefs.
Speaking of the film, Egoyan says: "Religious systems have lost their value. Indicators, markers and sacred objects have lost their meaning. And this kid has to reorganise them, has to go back to the original scrolls, if you will, has to go back to his grandmother's place, has to go back to his father's ancient scroll of the violin and understand what it was intended to be and reformat that in the real world and stop just receiving this wisdom from other people."
Egoyan's use of the word "reformat" is interesting in light of a filmography which often deals (somewhat superficially) with the influence of media and technology on memory and ideology. What the hug-a-terrorist narrative of "Adoration" suggests is not only that the internet is all about immediate and spontaneous emotion and gratification, a landscape which is unable to ever provide catharsis, but that life is inherently infected with a kind of confusion which can only be made sense of by networks and trawler-like search engines. Once you find what you're looking for, and deem it worthwhile, ditch the rest. Reformat and start rebuilding.
The film ends with old families and family ties collapsing and new family ties being forged, a kind of multinational new community, all boundaries broken, in which a Lebanese woman, step-mom, mixed race son and Canadian man wipe the slate clean and start over, ironically, in a room full of a dangerously selective past.
8/10 – Though heavily flawed, this is Egoyan's best film since "Exotica" and "The Sweet Hereafter". Worth one viewing.