Oh, Egoyan’s attempts to understand the past through contrivances and meta-narratives! Gotta love’em. Whereas with Ararat, Egoyan tried to get us to understand the Armenian genocide through making a movie about making a movie about it (yeesh), here he tries to get us to understand suicide bombing and terrorism, and the resulting prejudice, by making a movie about a kid who

Spoiler Alert!

lies about his dad being an infamous terrorist.

I don’t know why Egoyan thinks this is a better or even a decent way of getting us closer to “truth”, whether it be factual or emotional. I find the artifice and the metaness of these types of movies to be annoying and emotionally ineffective. Putting aside the structure, which is non-linear, I guess to give it some kind of mystery, the film’s plot revolves around two major contrivances, one of which doesn’t feel believable at all. (That is, that his teacher would a) encourage the lie – the first contrivance – b) mess around with his family and c) have a connection to the kid).

And then there’s the usual dialogue problem that we get with Egoyan, where so many of his lines and the interactions feel forced and stagey and not at all natural. In this film Egoyan’s stagey dialogue is made all the more apparent by the improvised bits, many of which feel more authentic than his dialogue.

Hey, at least there are all those Godspeed bits.

And at least it’s nowhere near as terrible as Ararat.

4/10

• Directed by Atom Egoyan
• Produced by Robert Lantos, Jennifer Weiss, Simone Urdl
• Written by Atom Egoyan
• Starring
  • Devon Bostick as Simon
  • Rachel Blanchard as Rachel
  • Scott Speedman as Tom
  • Arsinée Khanjian as Sabine
  • Kenneth Welsh as Morris
  • Noam Jenkins as Sami
  • Katie Boland as Hannah
  • Geraldine O’Rawe as Carole
  • Louca Tassone as Young Simon
  • Yuval Daniel as Security Officer
  • Jeremy Wright as Delivery Guy
  • Thomas Hauff as Nick
  • Martin Roach as Car Owner
  • Michael Barry as Skinhead
  • Ieva Lucs as Berating Woman
  • Hailee Sisera as Jennifer
• Music by Mychael Danna
• Cinematography by Paul Sarossy
• Edited by Susan Shipton
• Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics
• Release date: May 22, 2008
• Running time: 100 minutes
• Country: Canada
• Language: English
• Budget: $4 million