Adoration

Reviewer: Jonathan Poritsky
Rating (out of 5): **½

Give Atom Egoyan 110 minutes and he’ll give you a handful of unrealized MacGuffins and a whole big piece of his mind. Adoration, just out on DVD, spends more time dabbling in the soft art of misdirection than actually resolving a plot. In fairness, the film does portray our current technological moment (and the teenagers who are its biggest beneficiaries) quite accurately. If only the film's overarching message of our tech-induced de-sensitivity weren’t so 1995 (hello The Net).

The skeletal plot takes off at a saunter as orphaned high school student Simon (Devon Bostick) begins telling his friends a tale of his father’s supposed terrorist tendencies, which resulted in the near-bombing of an airplane and the death of his mother. Living with his financially strained Uncle Tom (Scott Speedman, The Strangers, Underworld), Simon’s story attracts an ever growing internet audience of kids, pundits, intellectuals, ideologues and other talking heads. Can fundamentalism be legitimized? Humanized? Are the people who survived the non-plane crash victims in their own rite? These questions and more grow alongside a confused plot regarding Simon’s family history and his mysteriously doting French teacher, Sabine (Egoyan's wife and frequent star Arsinée Khanjian).

The strongest moments of the film actually occur in Simon’s laptop, where the ongoing argument about his father’s legitimacy flames on, seemingly around the clock, via video chat. The teens who argue endlessly are portrayed quite accurately: they are indignantly stupid in the way that only high schoolers can be. It is refreshing to see the actual conversations of teens onscreen rather than seeing a Juno spout off poppy soliloquies a la Rachel Maddow. Think Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, only the story is trying to end up somewhere.

The DVD release is chock full of deleted scenes, making ofs, trailers (some good ones), and a lengthy interview with Mr. Egoyan. Unfortunately, his talk is overly simplistic, and he drones on a bit about the role of the internet in society and why he is so interested in it. At one point he pulls out an oft-quoted Godard-ism which got me thinking that maybe those well-read and disaffected kids’ rants are more personal than I first imagined.

Whatever its flaws, the film is still worth a watch, and will certainly incite meaningful conversation on your way to gym class.