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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 Israeli authorities, questioning the woman - his mother - pregnant with him, years before. Simon's teacher, Sabine, reading the story, in his French class, of a thwarted terrorist attack, the week before. Simon it turns out is turning this story into his own made-up autobiography. His parents are dead - a car accident? A deliberate accident on the part of his angry Muslim father who can't handle the prejudice in his family? Sabine...encouraging the boy to keep with the story of his parents, the terrorists, to pretend it's real, to shock his classmates, and later a community of professors and "survivors" of the plane that never exploded, the attack that never happened. Simon's uncle, Tom, who raised him, who hated his father, who took the child and brought him up in the city, not being able to afford it working his job as a tow-truck driver, wrestling with selling Simon's violin, inherited from his musician mother, to pay their debts. Sabine, insinuating herself into the Simon's life, and later his uncle's.... the grandfather, dead several months, a presence in recorded video, angry at his son-in-law for being a radical, angry at his son for not being more like him, angry at the world and at the truth...whatever it might be.

So in a nutshell is Atom Egoyan's latest, another foray into lies, deceptions, half-truths, difficult generational issues, ethnicity and religion and identity. It's tempting to say, been there, done that, and I can't deny that temptation. This is all pretty familiar ground for Egoyan, and I'm not entirely sure that he offers much of anything that is really new and interesting here to those who have seen his work before - though it might seem quite novel to those who haven't. It's less sexual in orientation, less "perverse" I guess you could say than EXOTICA which it most immediately calls to mind; it's fairly strongly concerned with video and the Internet and how they widen and broaden the aspects of truth- or lie-telling, as was his early feature SPEAKING PARTS, but it never quite goes into the dangerous psychological territories that film explored. 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. It's more often Egoyan's male characters that tread the thin line over the chasm of despair and madness but here it is the female teacher, full of secrets and never quite articulated desires who registers most powerfully.

As usual for the director, this has a strong feel for place (Toronto, mostly middle-class areas) and the characters all seem very self-aware - too much so, often. I'd like to see a stupid or even just an average, clueless character for once, actually. It's pretty bleak stuff throughout, with violence and terrorism and racial hatred simmering but never quite boiling over in many scenes, and depression and lost hopes and desires filling much of the remainder of the space. 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. There were several uneven scenes, and as good as Khanjian is she just can't quite overcome her character's limitation as someone who's just wacky - or sane - enough for whatever the scene requires; then again, even the scenes that struck me ass "off" were disquieting in an interesting way - one wonders often just how messed-up the director might really be. I also had something of a problem with the really overbearing use of music - slow, dirge-like violin music through much of the film (by regular Egoyan collaborator Mychael Danna) and a couple of too-loud pop songs dominating a couple of late scenes. The fact that music is an underlying theme in the film perhaps helps to explain these choices, but still it seems to me that quiet would have been more appropriate at a few points, but was never allowed to exist.

All in all then a mixed bag. 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. Worth a look overall; if I seem to be highlighting my criticisms, it's probably because I expect a lot from this great director, one of Canada's most significant film artists. Were we allowed half-stars, this would probably deserve 3 1/2; it's harder than most to rate, because conflicted and irritated as I was by much of it, I'm still thinking a good deal about it.

The Catholic Encyclopedia defines adoration as "an act of religion offered to God in acknowledgment of His supreme perfection and dominion." "Adoration", the film, is about religion, ethnocentrism, and the place that these have in an age of terrorism. But, it is not only about that; it is also about uncertain people stumbling through life, making mistakes, and trying to find a path that suits them. I compare "Adoration" to a gun for multiple reasons, two of which I will describe now. The first is because it is loaded with many heavy messages and themes, all waiting to explode at any moment; whether they do or do not, however, I will not reveal. The second is because "Adoration" is about as subtle as that much-maligned weapon as well, presenting its potent themes with an overbearing and too-much-for-its-own-good approach. At times, it is as though Atom Egoyan is hitting his audience over the head with a hammer, hoping that one of the many strikes will change something inside of them.

Read My Full Review Here: www.thecinemaboy.blogspot.com

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. Egoyan doesn't universalise, he doesn't simplify. He may be the least glib film-maker out there.

I was lucky enough to see him speak about this film after it screened at the London Film Festival. He was asked a question about the political content of the film; rather than claim that the film isn't political, as I have heard other artists do when confronted with this question about their work, he responded that the politics in the film are entirely located within the family - a refreshingly nuanced response.

He is also far more willing to risk losing an audience than almost any other director, pushing dramatic situations into absurdism or uncomfortable comedy, or outright confounding ambiguity, when it would be easier and more surefire to go for more conventional dramatic effects, like irony, or poignancy. 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. After the screening, I told my partner that I'd found it moving, and he expressed surprise, as he valued the lack of sentimentality, almost the dispassion, of the film. Reflecting on it, I realised that when I used the word 'moved', I was using it to express a feeling separate from being emotionally invested in the characters in a film (as in, say, 'Mysterious Skin' or 'Magnolia', both of which sent me off into crying jags). Egoyan's films (with the exception of 'The Sweet Hereafter', which is heartbreaking and cathartic and, as it happens, my favourite film bar none) almost seem to displace my emotional investment into the structure of the movie, similar to the way music engages the listener - or, perhaps, more unusually, they displace it onto the ideas themselves; ideas like the psychology of martyrdom, the instant narrativisation of internet discourse and its consequences, the elusive boundaries of personal responsibility (a recurring concern in Egoyan's films), the conciliatory and revelatory aspects of art, and all the other stuff this movie left buzzing round in my head. If you'll bear with me, I think what I'm saying is that I feel a kind of emotional topography of ideas in Egoyan's movies, a recognition that intellectual frameworks and emotional responses aren't detached in people's lives; the characters, the structure and the brainfood are all connected, in sync; you aren't manipulated into crying, but you may just feel your heart aching all the same.

"In Modernism, reality used to validate media. In Postmodernism, media validates reality. 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 majority of his films revolve around some traumatic past event, his casts gradually piecing together the past until some cohesive truth is revealed. These films are comprised of seemingly disconnected sequences and seemingly unrelated characters, vignettes that only begin to gel and come together in some revelatory climax.

These films also switch between eras, their narratives jumping from past to present to future, until history is concretized and the traumatic event is resolved in the present. Entwined with this search for truth will also be a study of media, how truth changes with context, the blurring of fact and fiction and a story which unfolds both in real life, and in some other form, often a film within the film, stage performance, school play etc. Virtually all of Egoyan's films adopt this narrative structure, which seems to blend a modernist search for truth with a decidedly postmodern admittance that truth requires the careful sorting of both testimonials and subjectivity.

"Adoration" is the story of an orphaned boy who is encouraged by his teacher to invent a story about his parents. He concocts a fictional account of his father planting a bomb in his mother's suitcase to perpetrate a terrorist attack, then takes his story to the internet, where audiences perceive it as being real, and discuss the various moral and wider implications of the tale. 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. "Adoration" is very didactic, and not as smart as Egoyan thinks it is, but Egoyan's elegance and the fact that the film is framed as a "lesson" being taught to a student, helps dilute the film's preachy tone.

If the film's walking mouthpieces at times get annoying, Egoyan's cast of characters nevertheless work well on the level of allegory. Peel away the distractions and what you ultimately have is a drama in which a crumbling figure of white privilege and patriarchal power clings so steadfastly to religious systems, false wisdom and outdated values that a middle eastern man and his wife are sent to their deaths. Significantly, they die in a car crash which resembles the head on collisions of suicidal dive bombers. The crash itself is caused by "not seeing" and by being "distracted by symbolic totems". Like Egoyan's "The Sweet Hereafter", the film's central concern is determining who is responsible for the crash, and whether the crash is an act of murder, terrorism, accident or something more.

Living in the wreckage of these deaths are the wife's brother (a tow truck driver, symbolically always carrying his sister's wreckage), son, and the father's ex wife, all of whom have to learn a lesson. This lesson (taught to them by the boy's teacher) is provoked by the student's fictional account of his father's death, in which his father changes from a terrorist, and his mother a hapless victim, to human beings once again. At this point the son (who symbolises the children of our internet future) then burns all ties with his grandfather and embraces a new form of adoration or humanity, the film's title revealed to be a cautionary message: be careful what and who you revere and adore, question what you've been taught to believe and be wary of the power that false ideas have on people's imagination and beliefs.

Speaking of the film, Egoyan says: "Religious systems have lost their value. Indicators, markers and sacred objects have lost their meaning. And this kid has to reorganise them, has to go back to the original scrolls, if you will, has to go back to his grandmother's place, has to go back to his father's ancient scroll of the violin and understand what it was intended to be and reformat that in the real world and stop just receiving this wisdom from other people."

Egoyan's use of the word "reformat" is interesting in light of a filmography which often deals (somewhat superficially) with the influence of media and technology on memory and ideology. What the hug-a-terrorist narrative of "Adoration" suggests is not only that the internet is all about immediate and spontaneous emotion and gratification, a landscape which is unable to ever provide catharsis, but that life is inherently infected with a kind of confusion which can only be made sense of by networks and trawler-like search engines. Once you find what you're looking for, and deem it worthwhile, ditch the rest. Reformat and start rebuilding.

The film ends with old families and family ties collapsing and new family ties being forged, a kind of multinational new community, all boundaries broken, in which a Lebanese woman, step-mom, mixed race son and Canadian man wipe the slate clean and start over, ironically, in a room full of a dangerously selective past.

8/10 – Though heavily flawed, this is Egoyan's best film since "Exotica" and "The Sweet Hereafter". Worth one viewing.

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. Notice: it was lesson about a terrorist couple who exploded themselves in a airplane and Simon pretends to be the son of this couple. All that he says looks like the truth, he shocks the whole class and makes the teacher very impressed but it's not. 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 story gets dark when suddenly Simon shares his fake story in a chat room sort of like if he was testing people's reactions about the story of the poor boy whose fathers died in a terrorist attack. This part of the film gets totally unconvincingly specially when Simon talks to other teenagers and we see their opinions, very annoying. Once again not a real deal of what teenagers really think and act, very phony.

If you look closer you will notice that Simon almost doesn't replies to the other people, letting themselves talk what they want, mostly because he knows his parents past is not true, but he wanted to know how bad he could felt if people said bad things about his mother and father. But he gets that experience with his dying grandfather (Kenneth Welsh) who didn't liked Simon's father (Noam Jenkins) an Arab. Even with that he stays the same, trying to figure out who their parents were and the story behind the violin, one of the most precious treasures they left for him.

Egoyan chooses to tell this story in a very non-linear way, pretty much like a puzzle with many missing pieces and in the end you'll get a very beautiful picture. This is very important, having the story presented in a linear way it would spoil the whole mystery behind everything. Although some connections are forced, situations seems very unbelievable and non convincing at all and the audience has to swallow it down if you think in another way thinking that it's just a film and things like that doesn't happen in real life you'll enjoy it.

"Adoration" is also enjoyable for the excellent performances of the casting. Arsinée Khanjian is wonderful playing the teacher and the mysterious woman who visits Simon's house dressed as Arab. My only reservation comes to the acting of the main lead actor. I think that Devon Bostick was a good and a bad choice for the role of Simon. Good because a more famous young actor would be too distractive to play this role. And bad because I found him dead on scene, with lack of expression (although he's cute), but that might be because the script wanted a young guy with few emotional response. Speedman surprised me a lot with a strong dramatical role, and the few scenes of veteran Kenneth Welsh are excellent and the way his character's behavior turns from a dedicate grandfather to an hateful person is shocking. Brilliant study of character but not much believable. 8/10

Adoration is one of those stupefying movies that begin to annoy you as the movie runs along culminating to utter contrivance reducing it to junk. The movie feels totally fraudulent by the time the final credits are scrolling mostly because of it's artificial and preposterous writing.(spoiler)The whole movie boils down to a horribly 2-Dimensional racially/religiously charged arguments between Lebonese Dad and Prejudiced Father-In-Law, one which sets the needed friction and momentum for everything else. The movie attempts to weave a big web of details too big for it's own good. There is dead-end scenes over and over talking about terrorism depicted on internet "chatrooms" adding zero - nothing but extraneous dead weight for the sake of shock value and "buzz". This is similar to watching characters in a movie watch another movie or TV - it flat out conveys nothing.(another spoiler)By the end we have a young kid questioning his past and some strangely obsessed Lebonese French teacher egging him on to create untruthful stories about his father to deal with his pent-up emotional grief fortified on by earlier stated Father-in-Law (Grand-father). This is a movie that got re-edited too much.