Adoration / There’s an old saying about what the road to Hell is paved with, and in writer/director Atom Egoyan’s hands, it all starts with what seem like good intentions. A high school French instructor (Arsinée Khanjian) instructs her class to translate a news story about a Palestinian man who sent his pregnant Irish fiancée to Israel, planting a bomb in her luggage without her knowing, intending to kill the nearly 400 people on board her flight. Instead of simply translating, Simon (Devon Bostick) writes a first-person account, casting himself as the then-unborn child. The instructor encourages him to continue writing the story, as she also teaches drama.

“I’m not in drama,” Simon says. His teacher informs him that he is now.

Simon takes his project one step farther, putting his tale online presented as fact. His site becomes viral, attracting a number of people who join in the cause and debate. It’s a Blair Witch Project only with real monsters and demons. The user comments balloon out of control with a parade of the horribles, fanatics decrying both Simon’s father and mother for different reasons, along with crazy people who claim to have been on that fictional flight sharing their own “personal” stories. Fears and suspicion lingering after 9/11 bring about a cacophony of voices, as the tale of two parents becomes part of something much larger.

It’s this part of Adoration that proves the most fascinating, because of the depth to which Simon both vilifies and defends the alternate version of his own family. But behind the intentions are motivations, and in Egoyan’s hands, there are plenty. Simon’s parents were indeed a bi-racial couple, both of whom were killed in a car crash. His grandfather is an unrepentant racist, insisting to this day that the real-life death of his daughter was intentional, a political casualty at the hands of her Muslim mate. And then there’s Simon’s uncle, who’s taken over as a father figure, but still harbors father issues of his own.

There’s a lot going on, both on and under the surface, and sometimes, it almost derails the entire project. There are what could be called twists, but only because Egoyan keeps his hand from his audience–making what are more like sudden left turns than twists. Some of these work, others don’t, or at least not as well, and some of Adoration is simply not believable. Any person who has spent any amount of time looking at reader responses on Web sites such as YouTube would find that the people who chime in with their opinions in this film are unlike Internet commentators anywhere else in the world, giving thoughtful, well-articulated responses, instead of the “LOL, U R stoopid” that litters the information superhighway. And when the lunatics begin to drown out normal debate, Adoration slips into heavy-handed territory. “When someone carries around that much anger all the time,” Simon’s grandfather says on his deathbed, “it makes them seem stupid. That’s the thing about anger: it sucks up a lot of intelligence.”

It also sucks up a lot of screen time, and as subtly crafted as the first half of Adoration is, the latter portion becomes almost as shrill and as angry as those the film rails against.

The biggest problem is that for a film that takes its time revealing secrets with alternate-reality scenes, a timeline that switches back and forth and Egoyan’s signature, dreamlike staging and scoring, what is revealed is superficial, barely scratching the surface of what breeds fear, suspicion and outright hatred in others. Perhaps that’s by design, as there are no easy answers–it’s the questions that are interesting. In Adoration, sometimes these questions come with a touch of condescension, and others are too abstract, too large to be properly addressed in a 100-minute film. But those who see it will have questions of their own, and there will be debate on the issues raised. It’s not a film to like, but it is one to watch, to judge and to question.

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