Adoration

"Adoration" starts and ends very similarly: in a delirium. In the opening minutes, we are plunged into a boy's class reading of a paper condemning his father as a terrorist who used his wife as a suicide bomber. We learn soon in that this is a fake story, and that the boy is being provoked by his French and drama teacher to iron out his tale into a play. This totally false idea is soon turned onto the internet via video chatting and eventually becomes somewhat of a small phenomenon. This is intercut with the boy recording his grandfather talking about his mother and father. We learn more about his views later on (and how they were formed, which, to me, seems very foolish).

Atom Egoyan milks these threads out a little bit but then tries to trace the roots of everyone and gets lost in a ridiculous corridor of unplanned thought. It doesn't help that "Adoration" is poorly made altogether. It just doesn't seem right for an esteemed director like Egoyan to have written and got entangled in a total disaster. First off, his script is pretty uncultivated. He goes into the effects of terrorism and word-of-mouth and other little things, but he doesn't go into any in very much detail. This brings up the question: what's the film about? I know, it's essentially about an adolescent who participates in some sort of lie that doesn't win him that many friends over the internet and how he lives with his, well, "barbaric" (this is how the film desperately wants to portray him) uncle who's taking care of him because his parents died. (They died in some sort of freak car accident. How this happens and how Simon, their son, is spared is totally ridiculous.) But what really is the film about? Not much, really, except for family dynamics and racism. Tom, the uncle, had a really racist "upbringing", apparently. Now check this: to test this, the boy's teacher comes in costume to their house and tries to incite some sort of reaction. This just adds to the total idiocy of the film. Sabrine, the teacher, ends up having a much bigger part in the scheme of things and this just makes things ever more absurd.

The last twenty minutes are essentially just a bunch of nonsensical, predictable snippets strung together in haphazard fashion. They make the film an unintentional comedy. Other scenes are dealt with in more idiotic ways. The moments between Simon's mother (Rachel Blanchard) and father named Sami (Noam Jenkins) are shot on high-gloss, laughable film, and filled with ultra-simplistic dialogue and scarce of logic (as the rest of the film is). Well... the rest is just as bad. Devon Bostick as Simon, Scott Speedman as Tom, and Arsinée Khanjian as Sabrine are all awful. A better "Adoration" would have started with better actors in these shoes. But then again, you would have to change a lot in "Adoration" to make it even halfway decent. Egoyan's pen seems to be out of ink, sense, and any thought, and jammed with unrealistic plot twists and ludicrous dialogue and outrageous characters.

Every scene is very flawed. Most are filled with unbelievable coincidences. Some are just dumb for the little details put inside of them (like when Simon is on the web and does dumb stuff like move the computer back and forth while getting snacks, playing with his pet mouse and his guitar and such, which are distracting). Others are just incredibly messy and predictable (such as the closing scenes with Simon, and how he "rebels" with a violin). Any way you want to slice it, "Adoration" is a very bad film, the kind that comes around once in a while to show you that even the best of directors fall at times off their trains of thought into complete idiocy. D-