Devon Bostick in Atom Egoyan's Adoration.
Atom Egoyan’s new film boasts a truly fascinating underlying question: how does the Internet interact with our real-life construction of ourselves? It’s coupled with high-concept storytelling and a timely plot.
But unfortunately the execution isn’t very good. Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian) uses a real-life story, of a terrorist who sent his wife as a suicide bomber into an Israel-bound plane, as an exercise in her French class. One of the students, Simon (Devon Bostick), is inspired to retell his own life story as if the terrorists were his parents, and Sabine encourages his imagination as a drama exercise.
His classmates are riveted and his version of the story eventually leaks to the Internet, which spawns lots of talking-head chatter on video chat rooms about the implications of his parents’ “actions.” As often happens on the Internet, everyone joins in the fray: people who would have died on that plane, college professors exploring the implications of the terrorists’ actions, high schoolers musing on the relative nature of courage. And Simon watches the conversation unfold, occasionally jumping in.
Simon’s parents are, in fact, deceased, and he’s been raised by his uncle, Tom (Scott Speedman), who is struggling to support them. A few strange encounters between Tom and Sabine, and the truth begins to surface – about Sabine’s past, Simon’s parents, the family’s secrets, and the things we do to connect with or avoid one another. And then it starts to get a little strange.
Adoration‘s waters are muddied, for a few reasons. First, the ideas about Internet-mediated identity – and how it crosses over into real life – start out fresh, but are inexplicably abandoned halfway through the story. All threads need not be tied up, but this is a half-hearted attempt at exploring a concept, and it comes off that way.
Second, the twists in this story feel a bit contrived, and that feeling is exacerbated by all the nonlinear storytelling. You start to lose track of which flashbacks are real and which are in Simon’s imagination. A hefty “a-ha” moment would have made the twisty storytelling worth the convolution, but as it ends it’s thoroughly unsatisfying.
And speaking merely from personal taste, I found the wall-to-wall swelling string-based soundtrack at first lovely, then tension-building, and then horribly frustrating. It’s the kind of music that signals that this is a prequel . . . but it lasts for the whole movie.
Adoration makes you feel as if there are lots of great plot elements here, and they should have been carefully separated into different films, so that each could be thoroughly explored and tightly written. Egoyan clearly has some interesting ideas about technology and how it interfaces with our construction of self and society. It’s a shame the film doesn’t work better.