Adoration is the latest entry in writer-director-Canfilm icon
Atom Egoyan’s career-long treatise on technology, fiction and identity.
And, like so many Egoyan offerings before it (Exotica,
Ararat, Where the Truth Lies) the film is a non-linear,
exquisitely structured, interesting and ultimately antiseptic puzzle
that treats grief and the search for identity as intellectual
exercises. This time, the identity-searching’s done by Simon (Devon
Bostick), a boy who explores his complicated feelings about his dead
father by convincing his classmates (and an internet chat room) that
Dad was a famous thwarted terrorist. Felicity‘s Scott Speedman
shows up as Simon’s uncle; his subtle performance makes you think
and feel, a balance the rest of the film lacks.
This article appears in Nov 5-11, 2009.
