Film Review: Adoration

ADORATION
By Travis Mackenzie Hoover

Exclaim!
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Sept 5 2008
Canada

Egoyan has pretty much crumbled these last few years and his latest
effort in pious windbaggery is no reversal of the trend. Where he once
at least made his points clearly, if awkwardly, here he’s possessed
of a marble-mouthed inarticulacy that suggests he’s in over his head.

The centre of the movie is a tragedy where a Lebanese/Canadian boy
loses his parents in a car accident, is more or less colonized by
his career racist grandfather and unleashes his ambivalence through
a terrorist saga he passes off has actual family history.

But Egoyan can’t just do this straight, he has to throw in bizarre
moralism involving a teacher (Arsinee Khanjian) meddling in the boy’s
life, turn Scott Speedman into his sad sack Russell Banks reject uncle,
hit overdrive on the pretentious speechifying and ladle on Brechtian
devices so impenetrable that they obscure more than they reveal.

He of course indulges his fetish for technophobia, this time training
his steely gaze on the internet and its ability to distort fact
and opinion, which might have been fine were it not for its tenuous
connection to the narrative — it’s shtick so de rigueur that it no
longer registers as honest inquiry.

Every minute of this film is ridiculous, mealy-mouthed and impossible
to believe; it’s all the more tragic for having a real kernel of
truth at its core. So determined is Egoyan to make a grand statement
rather than explore his themes that vital issues of otherness and
cultural imperialism become swamped by silliness and consigned to the
trash-heap of hapless souls who wanted to be somebody but should have
been more specific in picking who. (Alliance)