"Adoration"

By David Hudson on 05/08/2009

[Updated through 5/9]

"If Atom Egoyan weren't in such a hurry to cram all sorts of up-to-the-minute gewgaws (vidchats, xenophobia, handheld video recorders, even terror attacks) into the unwieldy, disjointed contraption that is his twelfth feature, 'Adoration,' he might have turned out a mildly entertaining, if overly intellectualized piss-take on 1940s B-grade family melodrama - it even comes complete with shimmering Bernard Hermann-esque strings." Jeff Reichert for indieWIRE: "'Adoration's' the unlikely spawn of 'Ararat's' politically correct historical guilt complexes and the lurid classic noir drag of 'Where the Truth Lies,' and while it betters both of its immediate predecessors (generally by leaps and bounds, it must be said), it's still a fairly silly affair."

"Its story of a high school class assignment that becomes a minor cause célèbre is a rigorously structured variant of the everything-is-connected-to-everything school of filmmaking that has produced movies like 'Babel' and 'Crash,'" notes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "But unlike those movies 'Adoration,' Mr Egoyan's finest film since 'The Sweet Hereafter' (1997), doesn't strain to maintain a pretense of naturalism."

Writing in the Voice, Scott Foundas finds it "closer in form and tone to the Canadian auteur's early work (particularly his 1987 masterpiece 'Family Viewing') than to his erratic recent literary adaptations ('Felicia's Journey,' 'Where the Truth Lies').... Never short on ambition, 'Adoration' has no lack of interesting things to say or interesting ways to say them, but the longer it runs, the more you feel Egoyan working up a sweat to deploy the same effects - Pinterian abstractions, fractured timelines, shifting points of view - that he once made seem effortless."

"His point of view has rarely been so laughably retrograde," writes Keith Uhlich in Time Out New York.

"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." Nick Schager at Screengrab: "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... and character behavior and plot revelations that seem at once puzzling and contrived."

"Interestingly enough, Egoyan provides his own critique of his latest feature, albeit inadvertently," finds Andrew Schenker in Slant. "In one of the film's central scenes, Sabine [Arsinée Khanjian] proposes her project to Simon [Devon Bostick], asking him to enlarge his faux autobiographical sketch and read it to the class. When the boy questions her reasons, she explains, 'It's an exercise.' The boy, dubious, responds, 'An exercise in what?'"

"What happened in 'The Sweet Hereafter' felt firmly grounded," writes Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times. "What happens in 'Adoration,' like Simon's imagined life story, never finds purchase in a rational world."

"If 'Adoration' were a CD, it would be less a greatest-hits compilation and more a revisiting of early work by a musician who can't seem to make the old songs sound as good as they used to," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

In the L Magazine, Michael Joshua Rowin finds it "a just-obsolete curio of currently 'topical cinema,' attempting to confront our ambiguous perception of the inconceivable but instead reconfirming simple therapeutics to legacies of hate."

"The big problem with the film is that Mr Egoyan's narrative is frequently suspended between real incidents and mere speculations to the point that the viewer may lose track of what has actually happened, and by, with and to whom," finds Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

Matt Mazur meets Egoyan for PopMatters.

And via Movie City News, Katherine Monk talks with Egoyan for the Canwest News Service.

On a related note, Joe Bowman revisits "Ararat."

Online listening tip. Jacki Lyden talks with Egoyan for NPR.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes 08.

Update, 5/9: Online listening tip. "I noticed that from 'Exotica' onward, every one word film title of yours has an airport security scene or a custom lines scene. I'm wondering if this is Egoyan house style for a one word title. I'm wondering if it's a scenario in which you have a particular preoccupation or a concern or an anxiety for airports. What of this?" Ed Champion asks Egoyan.

[Photo: "Adoration," Sony Pictures Classics," 2008]

Tags: Adoration, Arsinée Khanjian, Atom Egoyan, Devon Bostick