Canadian Film Review: The Captive (2014)

*
Director: Atom Egoyan
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Rosario Dawson, Scott Speedman, Mireille Enos

The general consensus on Atom Egoyan seems to be that he's been in a sharp decline as an artist for the last decade, or so. I haven't really agreed with that, having found things to like about even Where the Truth Lies and Chloe, two of his least loved films, but The Captive may be the film that makes me change my tune. This abduction thriller is not just a mess, it's borderline unwatchable. Built around characters who are wafer thin, performances that never quite jive with each other, and a story which, were it told in linear fashion rather than in Egoyan's signature scrambled narrative style, would be immediately exposed as a tale that wouldn't even qualify for distinction as a good Lifetime movie, it fails in pretty much every respect. Seriously, this thing is baaaaad.

Canadian Film Review: Ararat (2002)

* * * 1/2
Director: Atom Egoyan
Starring: Arsinee Khanjian, David Alpay, Christopher Plummer, Marie-Josée Croze

What is truth and is it so delicate that it can be lost in the telling? Many of Atom Egoyan’s films center around this idea, the concept that truth can never quite be absolute, that it shifts according to perspective and is sometimes lost completely. Ararat is no different and is perhaps Egoyan’s most intense attempt to engage with that idea. Centering on the Armenian genocide which, depending on who you ask, did or did not happen, Ararat is an intricate and moving film.

Canadian Film Review: Exotica (1994)

* * * 1/2
Director: Atom Egoyan
Starring: Bruce Greenwood, Mia Kirshner, Elias Koteas, Don McKellar

Late in Atom Egoyan's Exotica strip club owner Zoe (Arsinee Khanjian) explains to patron Francis (Bruce Greenwood) that Exotica isn't a place where people come to heal. In a film where characters seem acutely, painful self-aware, this comment stands out as almost laughably naive. Of course Exotica is where people come to heal; just look at how many walking wounded come through its doors.

Exotica is the name of a club where Christina (Mia Kirshner) works, doing the same school girl act night after night while the DJ (Elias Koteas) waxes poetic about her "special innocence." One of the patrons captivated by that innocence is Francis, who has a connection to Christina outside the little world of Exotica, and waits for her every night so that he can have a private dance. Seeing her is a compulsion for him, a necessity; something he seems to need rather than enjoy. As we learn later, seeing him is also a necessity for her, something which has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with a shared pain from the past.

This story eventually intersects with that of Thomas (Don McKellar), a pet store owner involved in a lucrative smuggling opperation. Francis is the CRA agent assigned to audit Thomas' records and, after things go very wrong one night at Exotica, he blackmails Thomas into a "you help me, I help you" scheme. Things don't work out exactly as planned, but that's part of what makes Exotica such a strong movie.

The thing that makes Exotica so compelling is that so much of it is predicated on illusion both in terms of the story's content - the performance aspect of Christina's job is an obvious illusion, as is the idea that a patron can have a private dance in a place where someone is always watching the people who are watching - and the way that the story is told. Egoyan sets things up so that we think one thing and then he slowly folds the narrative back to reveal that it's actually something else. For example, an early transition finds us going from watching Francis at Exotica to sitting in a car with a very young Sarah Polley, giving her money and asking if she'll be available again soon. The scene is set up to have very sinister connotations but we later learn that she's his niece and that he pays her to come to his house and pretend to babysit while he's at Exotica. His motivations for doing this are revealed later still.

For the most part the connections between the characters are revealed early - we know how Christina and the DJ first met, how Christina knows Francis, and the tragedy that drives Francis back to Exotica night after night - but that works because unlike a lot of films that involve multiple characters and stories that ultimately converge, the point of this one isn't to reveal how they're all connected. Instead the connections are used to expand our understanding of the characters as individuals and as the film progresses those relationships keep gaining depth. Between its excellent screenplay and a cast that's great across the board (Greenwood, in particular, makes an impression), the film is resonant and endlessly fascinating - one viewing really isn't enough to fully appreciate what it is able to accomplish. The only real criticism that I have is that it feels a bit dated, much more so than many other films to come out the same year. Still, it remains an excellent film and is certainly one of Egoyan's best.

Canadian Film Review: Chloe (2010)

* * *
Director: Atom Egoyan
Starring: Julianne Moore, Amanda Seyfried, Liam Neeson

Uh... the hell?

From its first moments Atom Egoyan’s Chloe foregrounds the theme of masquerade. In a voice over the title character, played with aplomb by Amanda Seyfried, informs us that she’s capable of becoming anyone, of becoming exactly the person that a given situation requires. In hindsight the end of the film is spelled out in the beginning, but I have to admit that while watching it, it threw me for a loop. I guess there’s a degree to which that’s to the film’s credit, even though I think the ending is ultimately the weakest part of this whole endeavour.

From Chloe the film then moves to Catherine (Julianne Moore), a Toronto gynaecologist experiencing midlife anxieties. When her husband, David (Liam Neeson), misses his flight home and she later finds a photograph that may be innocuous but may also be incriminating on his phone, she becomes convinced that he’s sleeping around. After a brief run-in with Chloe in a restaurant, Catherine pursues her, wanting to hire her to test David’s fidelity. All she wants, she insists, is to know what David would do if approached by Chloe, but when she meets with Chloe later to find out how it went, she decides that the situation needs further testing. And then further testing. And then...

Given the number of articles about the film I’ve read in the last couple of days in which the word “lesbian” is part of the headline, I suppose it’s no secret that Catherine herself becomes sexually involved with Chloe. The scene itself is rather explicit but in no way exploitative; the way that it comes about is natural to the psychosexual themes that Egoyan is exploring. The story is all about Catherine’s feelings of being disconnected from her own sexuality and Chloe – who tells us at the beginning that she’s more symbol than person – represents both her current feelings of being sexually obsolete and her memory of her own once powerful sensuality. Her relationship with Chloe is less about any kind of sexual attraction to Chloe specifically than to the feeling of revitalization she gets from living vicariously through her. The stories that Chloe tells her, which seem to give her a particularly strong charge, serve to illuminate a connection to David that she herself has lost sight of; when she initiates sex with Chloe, she does so by asking for a demonstration of how David touches her. To her this isn't her having sex with Chloe, but her playing the role of David having sex with Catherine, played by Chloe. The film’s treatment of these murky waters is fascinating and makes it worth seeing even if it does (and I honestly can’t emphasize this enough) fly totally off the rails in its final ten or fifteen minutes.

Whatever weaknesses Chloe might have, no blame can be laid on the actors. Moore renders an effectively contained performance as a woman who sees sex in purely clinical terms and only reluctantly (and perhaps never fully) opens herself up to the possibilities of sensuality. She's a very cold character in terms of how she deals with others and quite possibly the most brutal figure in the whole the story (I'm still undecided about how I feel about the final shot: is it a tribute inspired by guilt, or is it a callous expression of triumph?). It's interesting to watch her play this very closed off character opposite Seyfried, whose Chloe is open to the point that her entire personality is dependent on the person with whom she's interacting. Seyfried has a tough job in this movie because the closer the story gets to the end, the more unbelievable her character should become, yet she makes you believe in Chloe. In her first interactions with Catherine, she hints at the things to come but manages to pull back just enough that she's never overplaying her hand and giving everything away. By the end of the film you should probably hate Chloe, but I actually found her to be the most sympathetic character, which I think is a testament to what Seyfried is able to accomplish with the role.

Many of the themes explored in Chloe are familiar from Egoyan's previous films. He's a filmmaker preoccupied with the psychology of sexuality and here focuses on voyeurism and what I suppose you could term sexual surrogacy. Much of what he does with this film is very interesting, though it must be conceded that when it comes to visually expressing the story's themes, he sometimes uses a mallet when a hammer would be sufficient. Nevertheless, what works in Chloe works very well. What doesn't work may leave you a bit baffled and results in a film that is uneven at best, but still one that I would recommend, albeit by a narrow margin.

Canadian Film Review: Adoration (2009)

* * * 1/2
Director: Atom Egoyan
Starring: Devon Bostick, Arsinee Khanjian, Scott Speedman

Like much of Atom Egoyan’s work, Adoration is a film that isn’t easily pinned down. It slips in and out of different time frames, it depicts events both real and imagined, it allows its characters and their relationships to remain somewhat elusive. That it works is a testament to his ability to guide the audience through the sometimes complicated plot. This isn’t an easy film and its refusal to really resolve itself might be frustrating to some, but it’s one of Egoyan’s stronger efforts.

The story centers on Simon (Devon Bostick), who was orphaned as a child and raised by his uncle, Tom (Scott Speedman), who takes on the responsibility out of love for his sister and in order to escape from the father who domineers and intimidates him. At school, Simon tells a story about his parents, relating that his father was an attempted terrorist who tried to send his mother, pregnant with him at the time, to Israel with a bomb in her luggage. This story is not true but the result of a writing exercise in the French class taught by Sabine (Arsinee Khanjian). Sabine, who is also the school’s Drama teacher, encourages Simon to continue to work with this story, which was inspired by an actual incident and which, through internet forums, reaches the survivors of that actual incident and sparks a fierce debate in online chat rooms.

Simon gets caught up in the debate, particularly in playing devil’s advocate with regards to his “father”’s actions and the question of whether they were committed out of love or hate. What Simon is really trying to deal with is the murkiness of the facts surrounding the deaths of his parents, Sami (Noam Jenkins) and Rachel (Rachel Blanschard), and the race based tensions within his family. His grandfather insists that Sami killed himself and Rachel on purpose and that him committing an evil act was inevitable due to his origins. Tom is generally silent on the subject, insisting that he didn’t know Sami that well despite the fact that he and Rachel were married for 10 years. Aside from wanting to know for sure what happened to his parents, Simon also wonders what Tom really thinks and, specifically, what prejudices he holds.

Though Simon is the film’s protagonist, it is Sabine who becomes the most fascinating character. She has reasons for encouraging Simon and for helping him to test his uncle that you wouldn’t expect. That she’s able to weave herself so snugly into his life might seem a bit too coincidental but Khanjian (Egoyan’s wife and a frequent figure in his films) is able to sell it and is also able to convey the idea that her intentions were harmless, even if the results have done damage. The way she enters Tom’s life on various occasions is intriguing and the way that the film keeps us guessing about her until the end is very effective. She’s the story’s wild card, seemingly capable of anything and able, it turns out, to turn the whole narrative on its head.

I think that, like many of Egoyan's other films, this one is ultimately questioning the concept and value of truth. The ending of Adoration seems happy but do we - or the characters, for that matter - really know more than we did at the beginning? The ending is rooted in Sabine's ability to provide a missing puzzle piece, but what if that piece is false? What if the information she's providing is as mixture of truth and fiction, just like Simon's story? No one can ever really know what happened to Sami and Rachel except for Sami and Rachel, but now the people who've been left behind have a story that gives them comfort - and maybe that's even better than the "truth."

Canadian Film Review: The Sweet Hereafter (1997)

* * * *
Director: Atom Egoyan
Starring: Ian Holm, Sarah Polley

It's dull in our town since my playmates left!
I can't forget I am bereft
Of all the pleasant sights they see,
Which the Piper also promised me,
...
And just as I became assured
My lame foot would be speedily cured,
The music stopped and I stood still,
And found myself outside the hill,
Left alone againt my will
- "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" by Robert Browning

Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter is not a film about discovering the cause of a terrible accident, nor is it a revenge drama, a story about a lawyer on a crusade for justice, or even a peek behind the curtain hiding the secrets of a small Canadian community. It isn’t even really about the dead, but a lament for those who survive and are forced to carry on hollowed by the loss. The characters move forward as if dragging weights behind them and yet the film itself is graceful, not intruding on their pain but stepping delicately around it.

Much of the story focuses on Mitchell Stevens (Ian Holm), a lawyer who comes to the town to recruit the residents in a class action suit against the makers of the school bus that went off the road and through the icy lake. The residents look at him with suspicion, but he’s not a money-grubbing ambulance chaser. He approaches the situation not with greedy excitement, but with resignation and the sadness of his own experiences. He has a daughter who is as good as dead, so lost is she in drug addiction. He knows sorrow and is driven by the need to hold someone accountable – if not for his own family tragedy, than those of others.

Some of the families join his cause, including Risa (Alberta Watson) and Wendell (Maury Chayken), who provide Stevens with a rundown of the other residents in town; the Ottos (Earl Pastko and Arsinee Khanjian), artists described by everyone else as hippies; and the Burnells, whose daughter, Nicole (Sarah Polley), is one of the few survivors of the accident. In scenes which take place prior to the accident, Nicole reads from “The Pied Piper,” unsuspecting of the way in which she will come to identify with the boy left behind. Like him she has a physical reminder of the tragedy, as she’s left paralyzed in the accident, and she must contend with the loneliness of being the only child left in town and the responsibility of, essentially, living for all those children who will be forever frozen in time. She also identifies strongly with the Pied Piper character. When asked why the Piper leads the children away rather than using his powers to force the townspeople to pay him the money they had promised him, she says simply that he does it because he’s angry. Nicole is angry, too, and at a crucial moment tells a lie in order to hurt the person who has made her angry.

There is a lot to this story, much of which gets left unsaid and that silence, that absence of words that ought to be there, makes it all the more powerful. Egoyan doesn’t allow the emphasis to be on the crash; as the story moves back and forth between the time before and the time after the accident, it keeps touching on that fateful trip, watching the bus make its way over the snow covered road with a feeling of the inevitable rather than the ominous. As far as direction goes, there is absolutely no room for improvement – Egoyan’s work is confident and masterful and the images he’s created are haunting.

Ian Holm and Sarah Polley do most of the heavy lifting as far as the actors go, though there’s not a bad performance in the bunch. Polley is an actress that I’ve always liked and here, as elsewhere, she suggests a maturity far beyond her years. Her soulful performance stands out even in a film where everything is top notch.

Canadian Film Review: Where The Truth Lies (2005)

* * *
Director: Atom Egoyan
Starring: Alison Lohman, Kevin Bacon, Colin Firth

Where The Truth Lies is a seductive and wonderfully constructed mystery from director Atom Egoyan. Starring Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth as a Martin and Lewis-like duo and Alison Lohman as a writer trying to uncover their darkest secret, this is a very engaging and effective film.

The mystery at the center of the film has to do with the death of Miami college student Maureen (Rachel Blanschard), who is discovered in the New Jersey hotel suite of musical comedy duo Vince Collins (Firth) and Lanny Morris (Bacon) in 1957. Shortly after Maureen’s death, which officials deem an accidental overdose, the duo breaks up and their careers go into decline. In 1972, Karen (Lohman) is hired to write a book detailing Vince’s life and career for which Vince will be paid a million dollars on the understanding that Karen will be able to get to the bottom of how Maureen’s body ended up in his room and why he and Lanny broke up. Unbeknownst to Vince, Karen has a prior connection to him. After Maureen’s death – but before the discovery of her body – Vince and Lanny host a telethon for children with polio and one of the polio stricken children who participates in the show is Karen.

Karen is an interesting character, one who seems to openly court danger. After her first meeting with Vince, she meets Lanny on a plane. Since Lanny had previously refused her publisher’s request for an interview, Karen assumes the identity of her friend, Bonnie (Sonja Bennett), in the hope of getting him to confide in her. Inevitably, this lie comes back to haunt her when she finds herself faced with Vince and Lanny at the same time. Both men feel that she’s betrayed them, but Vince agrees to carry on with their project and later talks Karen into taking a couple of blue pills, a decision which will put her in a position to be blackmailed by him the following morning. There are many instances when she seems to be the pawn of an elaborate game, but she consistently puts herself in the position to be manipulated and trapped by the people around her. The question is whether it’s by accident or design.

I won’t go any further into the plot of the film because it’s so carefully crafted and manages the rare feat of not showing its hand too early, giving the audience just enough clues and information throughout the film to make the ending plausible, but also holding enough back to retain the element of surprise. The screenplay is the strongest part of the film and, unfortunately, there are certain respects in which the film itself fails the story. The performances by Bacon and Firth are excellent, and all of the actors should be commended for their willingness to really go there in a series of quite explicit sex scenes, but the central performance by Lohman is really lacking. I’m not familiar enough with Lohman’s oeuvre to offer an opinion on her as an actress in general, but in this film she comes across as extremely wooden and unnatural, which is a major problem for the film since she’s its main focus.