Adoration

Plot synopsis:
Simon is a young orphan being raised under the care of his uncle Tom. The early scenes of the film show him filming his conversation in the hospital with his dying grandfather. Through the eyes of Simon we see the grandfather as a caring, wise man, while through the perspective of his uncle we see the racist, backwards side. Simon's grandfather hated Simon's father and claims that he intended to kill Simon's mother in the car crash when, as Simon finds out at the film's conclusion, he had an eye condition. This condition prevented him from being able to drive at night, as the glare from oncoming headlights would blind him. The evening of the car crash reveals a different side of the story, causing the memories of each character to meet head on, connecting disparate stories of each character to unite in an Egoyanesque conclusion.Simon's family narrative is cleverly knit into a news story presented to Simon by his high school French teacher as a translation exercise. An article is read by the teacher about an attempted bombing of an aircraft by a man who put explosives in his pregnant wife's luggage. Simon gets the idea to translate the story and write it from the perspective of the child in the woman's womb. The teacher encourages Simon to develop his story as a drama exercise, however Simon presents it to the class and to the world via the Internet as if he really was that child. The teacher's silence, as we find out later, is owing to her relationship with Simon's late father who died, with his mother, in a car crash when he was still a child. The narrative of the car crash and the attempted bombing of the plane become intertwined as a way for the characters to deal with their past experiences, which they have all been trying to deny.The film is about a search for identity in a digital age where the truth is oftentimes irrelevant. Simon's story of his suicide bomber father is met on the Internet with sympathy, anger, and even support as we see a skinhead on webcam telling Simon that his father was a hero. The alienation experienced by Simon in relation to the world-wide response he receives to this made-up story ultimately serves as a mechanism that forces him to turn away from his computer and video screen to face the actual issues he experienced as a child. Simon's story takes a twist that involves all the other characters in his life, everyone's narrative culminating in the piecing together of a fragmented past that needed to be re-examined in order for those in the present to be healed and re-connect with the people in their lives.

Tags: storytelling, flashback

Review:
Simon (Devon Bostick), a young high school student, tells his class that his Lebanese father Sami (Noam Jenkins) was a terrorist who attempted to blow up a plane with a bomb carried by his pregnant wife, Rachel (Rachel Blanchard), a talented violinist.
He (Simon) imagines having a father who is a demon; he wants to go as far as possible into what that might mean." Adoration begins with an indelible image – a young woman standing at the end of a pier overlooking a river playing the violin while her husband and young son watch in awe.
Sabine reads an article to the class about an incident that occurred in 1986 in which a Jordanian man, Nezar Hindawi, sent his pregnant Irish girlfriend on an El Al flight with a bomb in her handbag, of which she had no knowledge until it was discovered by Israeli airport security.Heavily influenced by his bigoted grandfather Morris (Kenneth Walsh) to believe that his father intentionally caused his mother's death in a car crash, the vulnerable Simon constructs a parallel between the article read by his French teacher and the death of his parents.
Simon's uncle, Tom (Scott Speedman), who raised the boy after his parents' death, acts as a mediator between his nephew and the teacher who encourages Simon to tell his fake story in the school auditorium.Tom is a tow truck operator with a short fuse who harbors a deep resentment against his father for the way he was treated as a child and his encounters with Sabine contain some of the film's most intense moments.
Though it contains a great deal of ambiguity and character motivations tend to be somewhat mystifying, Adoration is a very involving film with performances that are uniformly excellent, particularly Arsinee Khanjian as the emotionally-damaged teacher and Speedman and Bostock who provide enough tension to keep us riveted throughout..
Similarly, I won't reveal much about the story here.After losing his parents under questionable circumstances, Simon (Devon Bostick) is reluctantly being raised by his Uncle Tom (Scott Speedman).
Bostick is one of Canada's most prolific young actors (he co-starred in Citizen Duane, one of my Top Picks from the 2006 festival) and will hopefully be introduced to a wider audience if this film gets the distribution it deserves.The moment the credits began to roll I wanted to see "Adoration" again.
Having now seen "Adoration" at CIFF I'm not going to pretend I can't see where they're coming from- the film is a little preachy, there's bits of acting which are poor, there's a weakness to Egoyan's writing in that he seems to want to touch on every possible viewpoint on the issues being explored here within this running time, and occasionally it comes off as a little desperate.None of that keeps "Adoration" from being an intensely involving film, and a powerful one as well; a film about prejudices, loss, the power of technology, and the effect of fiction on reality and vice versa will always be topical, but given the actual plot of the film it is particularly relevant to today's world.
"Adoration" revolves around Simon (played by Devon Bostick), an orphaned teenager born to a Palestinian father and a white, North American mother, who both died in a car accident when he was a child, and was raised afterwards by his uncle Tom (played brilliantly by Scott Speedman).
When Simon writes a story about a terrorist who conceals a bomb inside his pregnant girlfriend's luggage before she boards a plane to Israel and imagines himself as the unborn child that is almost killed by the terrorist bomb (a story which has parallels to his racist and intolerant grandfather's version of the story of how Simon's parents died), his drama and French teacher encourages him to share it with his class, passing it off as truth.
"Adoration" is an effective and intelligent look at topical and relevant issues, but really shines as an examination of the nature of human thought, the results of the sort of environment which surrounds us, where hatred and prejudice is born, and ultimately as a character study of three individuals who all need to overcome events in their past by embracing and fully understanding them.8/10.
A teenager (Devon Bostick) who was orphaned after the tragic deaths of his parents is prompted by his teacher (Arsinee Khanjian) to deliver a fictional monologue about his father's failed terrorist act as fact in an elaborate "dramatic exercise" in Armenian-Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan's latest thought-provoking piece of abstraction "Adoration".
Like the young man's monologue that marries a true story to a false one about his parents, "Adoration" itself is an interesting dramatic experiment designed to provoke.
Though I always question Egoyan's motive in casting his wife Arsinee Khanjian in his films, in many ways, she gives her most understated and powerful performance here.
Scott Speedman as the uncle is really good, he's hiding behind a beard, giving curt responses to Arsinée Khanjian's questions.A problem: lots of use of internet chat rooms to flesh out the story; disembodied, undramatic characters for Simon to interact with (watch for the great Maury Chaykin to heat things up somewhat).
i'm gonna try and keep this review short, Basically i found this film pretty terrible, it tries too hard to be arty and symbolic but only comes off as pretentious and feels fake, who burns their phone to forget a video on it, there's a delete button hahaha.But in all seriousness, the music suited the film but was pretentious along with the film, the acting was really the only redeeming feature for me, i thought they did the best they could with the material they had at their disposal, however the story was poorly written and tried to be very symbolic which it pulled off to some extent, but a lot of the symbolism was unnecessary and as i said earlier tried too hard.Overall i think the acting was OK the rest was pretty terrible, and as i've stated before i believe that the attempt to be arty and meaningful just resulted in a cheesy, melodramatic and pretentious film..
I saw "The Sweet Hereafter" and loved it and I guess I expected "Adoration to be somehow in the same class of film.It was not.Adoration is a lot more like a student film, it was kind of embarrassing to watch in many parts and even more embarrassing to hear the cast and director talk about it as though it was a really thoughtful, well-made film.
Don't get me wrong, I know they were trying very hard with this movie and it was intended to tackle all sorts of tough topics in a latter-period Godard sort of way, but it just didn't work.I don't know why there are so many good reviews coming out for this film, I'm fairly certain that most of the people who it will be unhappy about their experience.
The film deals with a teenager called Simon (Devon Bostick) who's written a fictional monologue where his father left his pregnant mother on a plane and hid a bomb on her carry-on bag, which is discovered by the authorities and which foils his plans of terrorism.
So he decides to make a video diary where he films the bloggers who heatedly comment on his story, and who provide him with the necessary 'mind fuel' to deduct whether his father actually WAS an assassin, whether his mother was his victim, whether his grandfather (Kenneth Welsh) polluted their memory and whether his uncle (Scott Speedman) is hiding something.I know, it sounds like a complicated storyline...and it is.
But what about the...", then you start making so any questions, and you start coming up with so many answers, all of them giving birth to more questions...until you have no idea what you're even coming up with.Perhaps this was Egoyan's point, to keep us thinking and thinking until our thoughts seem to have detached from the film itself; it's a good thing to do- to have your public ponder so much- but it's bad when it affects the movie.
His parents died in an automobile accident years ago and he has been raised by his uncle Tom (Scott Speedman), a angry young man who has never married and whose only other family member living is his father Nick (Thomas Hauff) for whom he has little affection.
At school Simon takes French from teacher Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian) who encourages Simon's penchant for drama by encouraging a story Simon has created: he postulates that Sami placed explosives in Rachel's bag while pregnant Rachel flew to Israel with the intention of exploding the airplane killing 400 people.
There is a surprise twist to the true background of Simon's parents, Sabine, Tom, and the grandfather and Simon's fictional 'play' opens doors of emotional reaction from Simon's internet chatroom experience and from all of the people involved in the story.
I'm going to resist the temptation of asking the obvious question: If Egoyan's wife can't act, why does he put her in all of his films?Let's get back to the movie.
So all we get is fragments of philosophized thought and process that has meaning only to Egoyan.To compensate for not knowing a human speaker from a college textbook, Egoyan writes gaudy, overblown, and contrived plots which he populates with trendy but stock characters, whose past isn't personal, it's ceremonial.The hero is a young Canadian daubed in both Christian and Muslim colors; this makes him colorful, but it does not make him real, compelling, grounded, believable, interesting, or worth spending 90 minutes with.
Despite the background music occasionally distracting from what's in front of you, Adoration is a compelling film, not just as a character study, but as an experience many will be familiar with.People like me have come to expect thoughtful pieces of celluloid from filmmakers like Egoyan and he delivers once again, even with the film's minor technical flaws..
Simon (Devon Bostick) tells a story in his french class about his mother (Rachel Blanchard) and terrorism.
Religious, the openness of the Internet, teacher-student relations, truth-and-lies, peer relationships and the way a story can gather unexpected momentum in many forms.p.s. earlier posters, please don't confuse racism with cultural and ideological differences.I enjoyed 'Adoration' a lot, and was not let down by the almost-always perfect production style that comes out of Canada..
Atom Egoyan's "Adoration", following in his tradition as of late of religion and culture, stars Devon Bostick as Simon, a student who tells his classmates that his father was a terroristic bomber and that the only reason he's still alive is the bag with the bomb was confiscated by customers officers (which seems to be another theme in Egoyan films).
Like almost all of Atom Egoyan's movies, 'Adoration' is self-consciously exploratory, gently tracing the boundaries and pressure points that exist between characters in a manner that asks resonant, sometimes troubling questions about wider political issues without needing to generalise from the specifics.
For instance, the entire encounter between Arsinee Khanjian and Scott Speedman's characters, in which painful confession and angry confrontation are tempered by the awkward farce of the taxi-ride and invitation to lunch, the unsettling comedy of the confrontation with the taxi-driver, and, most opaquely, the utterly meaningless and consequence-free coincidence of Simon passing his uncle in a bus, and them failing to see each other.Most impressive of all, I think, is the balance this film strikes between intellectual engagement and emotional detachment.
Atom Egoyan's film "Adoration" is a complex and emotional story about how little lies can be dangerous and how the truth always will triumph at the end but with a little bit of pain.
In this thrilling story almost like an emotional and frantic time bomb waiting to explode Egoyan present us conflicted characters trying to figure out how to deal with their emotions, losses, their concepts of truth and lies, understanding and love.
To the audience it is a spider's web not very easy to follow where you always keep asking more and more questions about how this story is gonna end.In the story Simon (Devon Bostick) is a teenage boy who during a school task is asked by his French and Drama teacher Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian) to add intensity to its Drama exercise and present to the class as if all the things he was reading was true.
He lives with his uncle Tom (Scott Speedman) a hard working guy with many financial problems; and Simon's parents died in a car crash and he not knows too many things about them.
The new drama, Adoration is a confusing drama/thriller about a high school student named Simon (Devon Bostick) who tells his class his mother's husband, and his father put her on a plane with a bomb.
They never answered important questions like Is Simon telling the truth or making up a story?, and What is with these chatroom people?
Sabine, the teacher, played by Egoyan's muse and wife Arsinée Khanjian, reads the class an account in French of how Israeli security discovered a pregnant woman who arrived on a plane from the West with plastic explosives and a detonator in her handbag.
The focus shifts to Simon's actual family situation, in which Sabine appears to be more and more involved.Simon's parents died a decade or so ago in a car crash and he has been raised by his uncle Tom (Scott Speedman), who drives a city tow truck and is strapped for money.
There is a lot to admire in Atom Egoyan's "Adoration", a film we just got to see recently.
Working on his own screenplay, rather than adapting a novel, as he did with "Felicia's Journey", or in his masterpiece, "The Sweet Hereafter", Mr. Egoyan keeps involving the viewer in provocative issues, as it is the case with this entry.We are taken to a French class at a Toronto high school, where the teacher, Sabine, reads to the students, in French, a real story from a magazine.
Her encounter with Tom makes him realize the truth about this woman and her indirect connection to the events that molded Simon's and his own life after the fatal accident that took his sister's life.The excellent Arsinee Khanjian is perhaps the best reason for watching this engrossing film.
Simon, a high school student, reads an essay in English about his parents - his mother, a good and naive young woman; his father, a would-be-terrorist.
The only really striking aspect for me in this film was in the character of the teacher Sabine (Egoyan's muse, wife, longtime lead actress Arsinée Khanjian) who is so confused and messed up that she hangs just a thread away from being a parody - but is roped into reality by the fierceness and intensity of Khanjian's performance, possibly the best I've seen from her.
Khanjian as I said is terrific, and she and Scott Speedman as Tom really hold the film together - they're solid nearly all the way through so I really have to blame writer/director Egoyan for some of the stupider scenes, like one in which a taxi driver and Tom get into a ridiculously escalating argument seemingly just to make a plot point that has nothing to do with the scene.
If you've seen a lot of Egoyan like I have you'll certainly be familiar with much of what you see - whether you think it's more interesting or carried off better than I did is another story.
Atom Egoyan has not made many films over the years,BUT the ones he does create are always first rate & above all interesting.Adoration is a complex but yet simple tale of a dysfunctional family which in other hands would have been lurid sensational & dull.Here we have an intelligent & very creative High School student who in class tells a tale of how his parents died,at the beginning we think it may be all true,then we realize it may not have happened that way, we have a hateful grandfather, a conflicted Uncle who is now raising the lad, a teacher who is much more involved in the lads life than we suspect & of course his parents.The cast are mostly little known performers,however all give very fine performances.
Adoration is a Canadian film directed by Atom Egoyan that features Rachel Blanchard, Scott Speedman and Devon Bostick.
The movie explores the concept of cyberspace as a place for redemption in this drama about an adolescent boy named Simon,who reinvents his life on the Internet.Egoyan based the story partly on the 1986 Hindawi affair.High school French teacher Sabine reads to her class as a translation exercise a French newspaper report of a terrorist who planted a bomb in the airline luggage of his pregnant girlfriend.
In the course of translating, Simon, who lives with his uncle Tom, imagines that the news item is his own family's story: that his Palestinian father Sami was the terrorist, the woman was his mother Rachel, an accomplished violinist, and he was her unborn child.
Influenced by his grandfather, who disliked Sami (the audience sees Simon filming him with his mobile phone when he talks to him), Simon has always feared that the crash was not an accident but intentional.Sabine asks him to develop the story as a drama exercise, to read it to the class, and for dramatic effect to pretend that it really happened.
If you don't believe this, just think how many times you've described some real event as being 'just like a movie'." - Brad Holland By now we're familiar with the Atom Egoyan formula.
The film then progresses along two narrative streams – the first being the real story of the boy, whose parents were actually killed in a car accident, the second being the invented story about the planted bomb.Like Egoyan's "Ararat" (it also strongly resembles his 1987 film, "Family Viewing"), "Adoration" slowly turns into a kaleidoscopic rumination, this time of voyeurism, the totems of history, the ethics of terrorism, the obfuscation caused by technology, and various post 9/11 questions of racism, fear, paranoia etc.