2/4 Starring Devon Bostick ‘amp; Arsinee Khanjian ‘amp; Scott Speedman Directed by Atom Egoyan Rated R
Though the idea of an online lie that catches fire in ‘Adoration’ is novel enough to spike interest, it doesn’t take long before the drama dissipates into an exhausting catalog of fragmented thoughts. Veteran writer/director/producer Atom Egoyan, who braided a seamless character weave in 1997’s ‘The Sweet Hereafter,’ attempts to tie an artsy bow around his latest schizophrenic mess. Unfortunately, it appears that at some point in the last decade, Egoyan broke his nimble fingers.
In his newest take on coming of age in the information era, the filmmaker asks his audience to sit through a disorienting barrage of snapshot storylines, flashbacks and present-day narratives, blurring the line between reality and his own imagination.
The plotline is meaty enough: A French teacher (Arsinee Khanjian) instructs her class to translate a news article about a terrorist who plants explosives in the luggage of his pregnant girlfriend. However, Egoyan’s eyes are bigger than his stomach, and the director bites off more than he can chew in a film just short of two hours.
The assignment has an especially life-altering impact on one student, Simon (Devon Bostick), who was orphaned as a child when his father crashed the family car. Forever haunted by the mystery of whether the crash was intentional, Simon inserts his own history into the article, pretending his father was a terrorist behind the wheel.
With the surprising encouragement of his teacher, the help of a nifty aluminum MacBook and a 36-person video chat, word of Simon’s (fabricated) life story spreads like H1N1.
Within the sanctum of online forums ‘mdash; where teens spout stilted philosohies faster than ‘Dawson’s Creek’ ‘mdash; lies the film’s main theme: the impact of technology on human identity.
But talking heads tend to be more obnoxious than enlightening, arguinig over the validity of Simon’s story, the meaning of life, martyrdom and post-9/11 terrorism, among other things.
And the sermon doesn’t end there.
Simon’s expanding alternate reality and digital path to self-discovery are juxtaposed with an unlikely relationship between his uncle/guardian (Scott Speedman) and a mysterious woman masked in medallions and draped in a burqa.
Determined to pump spirituality into an already overinflated film, Egoyan depicts tension between the mismatched couple by sparking a caustic series of bite-sized religious debates.
That’s one of the film’s crucial missteps ‘mdash; its several disconnected plotlines occur all at once. In one blink, Simon is living within his terrorist fantasy. In another, he’s attempting to untangle his true family history. Still another revolves around his uncle, an introspective tow-truck driver with a fixed squint. An eerie violin drifting in and out of the tri-narrative serves as the only harmonizing backdrop to Egoyan’s characteristic surrealism.
Though the audience is largely abandoned as Simon’s two-hour search for meaning unfolds, the arduous journey is half compensated by mesmerizing cinematography that sustains Egoyan’s dreamlike virtual world.
But instead of igniting thoughtful discussion, lack of focus and fluidity make ‘Adoration’ into nothing more than a bizarre study in filmic microblogging.