Atom Egoyan’s Adoration shows how technology can put anyone in an interactive Dr. Phil

by Vincent Lima

Published: Saturday July 26, 2008

Tom (Scott Speedman), Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian) and Simon (Devon Bostick) in a scene from Adoration, written, produced, directed by Atom Egoyan. Sophie Giraud / © Adoration Productions. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. All Rights Reserved

Yerevan - Atom Egoyan's 12th feature film, Adoration, is very Egoyan, as expected. For one thing, it features Arsinée Khanjian. For another, it explores death and guilt – in its many manifestations. And, of course, there's the ubiquitous voyeuristic miniature video camera. Watching Adoration, anyone who has ever said, "If only I could have been a fly on the wall," may come to see that being a fly is not all that.

We have a boy, Simon (Devon Bostick), who lives with his youngish uncle (portrayed passionately by Scott Speedman), who is having a hard time making ends meet in the big city. The boy's parents are no longer around. In French class, his teacher Sabine (played by Khanjian) surprisingly assigns for translation a disturbing story, that of an Arab man  (played by Noam Jenkins) who sends his pregnant non-Arab girlfriend (Rachel Blanchard) to visit his parents in Palestine. She is unwittingly carrying explosives that were meant to destroy the El Al plane somewhere en route.

Why did the teacher assign this particular story? Why did the boy identify with the story and choose, as he did, to portray himself as the child with whom the woman was pregnant? Could it be that his Arab father had his non-Arab mother killed? Is that what his maternal grandfather (portrayed by Kenneth Welsh) wanted him to believe?

While these questions are playing themselves out, the boy's video portrayal of himself as the son of the terrorist (or terrorists, if we count the apparently unwitting mother in the story) goes viral. Suddenly it's the talk of futuristic video chat rooms. Here we meet an angry man who was on board that plane years ago; we meet others who identify strongly with the incident, though they were much more likely to be victims of, say, a local drunk driver than a terrorist incident somewhere over the ocean.

Egoyan shows us how we too can be on a middlebrow version of Jerry Springer; all we need is a webcam and a broadband Internet connection. Or an iPhone and a lot of time on our hands.

Adoration. Written, produced, and directed by Atom Egoyan. Produced by Simone Urdl and Jennifer Weiss. 100 minutes.