Adoration is an openly provocative film. Though it's seasoned with many of writer-director Atom Egoyan's favourite pet-themes (technology, memory, truth), the main course is a chewy, cerebral look at terrorism and religious intolerance in the 21st century. Egoyan even uses a real-life incident as the spark for his powder keg:
In 1986, a Jordanian terrorist attempted to bomb an Israeli plane by slipping C4 into his pregnant girlfriend's bag, but was thwarted by shrewd airport officials. In the film, a bright high school student named Simon (Devon Bostick) tricks his classmates (and later, the Internet community that springs up around him) into thinking that he was the child the woman was pregnant with as part of an ill-conceived drama and French class project. Better yet, he structures his essay in order to defend and humanize his terrorist “father.” Angry yet?
As tempting as it is to get emotional about Adoration, Egoyan pulls his old Exotica trick, building in subtle clues and elegant meta-commentary that suggests if you do, you've missed the point entirely. As with Simon, discussion appears to be what's important to Egoyan, and whatever stands in the way of intelligent discourse — whether that's violence or simple ignorance — is what's to be hated and reviled, not a specific ideology. In a world where political commentary has become seamlessly integrated with the partisan politics it's meant to regulate — requiring, as partisanism will, that the opposing side is not just incorrect but also dangerous and evil — Egoyan's somewhat more detached, academic model is both welcome and necessary.
Of course, the cranial subtext is only half the joy of a good Egoyan picture. At the heart of Adoration is Simon's very real, very personal conflict with his own feelings regarding the deaths of his parents (tempered somewhat by the angry bellowing of his racist grandfather in his memory), and his strained, but ultimately tender relationship with his uncle (Scott Speedman, replacing Bruce Greenwood as Egoyan's obligatory bearded smouldering guy).
Simon's story doesn't have quite the same heft as either of Egoyan's best-known films, Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, but if it did, it would endanger the arguably more important comment the film is attempting to make. Like both of those movies, Adoration is a clever cinematic puzzle box, one that reveals its solution with maddening coyness until all of its characters' psychoses are laid bare upon the cloth of the screen like pieces of a watch. Despite Egoyan's insistence that you resist caring for these people, it's hard not to feel like your heart's been torn out.
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