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.
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.