Devon Bostik considers his past in Adoration

Art versus Animals

Enigmatic humans and African mammals

Adoration ★★½

Directed by Atom Egoyan

Starring Devon Bostik, Kenneth Welsh and Rachel Blanchard

14A - 100 minutes

Opens Friday at the Odeon

I have always been baffled as to why Atom Egoyan long ago blazed to international recognition as a director. While there has been lots to savour—and think about—in certain films such as Exotica and Ararat, much of his output seems arch, painfully cerebral and afflicted with sluggish rhythms and mannered dialogue: almost, indeed, a parody of European-style art cinema. His strengths and weaknesses are on full display in Adoration, which explores what happens when Simon, a high-school teen with a troubled past, colludes with one of his teachers to present himself to his classmates in a way that is highly dramatic and entirely fictional.

Simon publicly claims in class to be the son of a real-life terrorist who, nearly two decades ago, had tried to use his pregnant wife as the unwitting courier for a bomb meant to destroy a plane flying to Israel. Simon—in actuality an orphan who for years has lived with his uncle—seems to be exorcising some of his personal demons by partially defending the bomber he pretends is his father. When his various chat-room encounters with his fellow students leak out into the wider world, there are startling and intense repercussions.

Egoyan typically pursues ideas at the expense of character, and Adoration gives us a panoply of his usual themes and devices: the irony that technology causes alienation even as it enhances our ability to communicate; the intense bonds of family; racial and religious strife—and this all presented in a fluidly disordered chronology, with much information emerging as hand-held video footage or on computer screens. But it all has a muffled resonance because the main characters don’t seem quite real. Then, in the last quarter of the film, things suddenly come into focus as Adoration turns into a family drama that, although conventional, has an emotional power that was previously lacking.

A good friend of mine saw Adoration in Vancouver with Egoyan in attendance for a Q&A;after the screening. Although he is more of a fan of the film than I am, my friend readily admitted that listening to Egoyan explain what drove him to make Adoration was considerably more engaging than watching the film itself. In other words, this will be perfect for those who still subscribe to Cahiers du Cinema.

Africa: The Serengeti ★★★★

Directed by George Casey

General - 39 minutes

Continues at the IMAX

The storytelling becomes much more linear and chronological with Africa: The Serengeti, a vintage IMAX film pulled out of the vault to complement the Royal BC Museum’s current mega-show, Treasures. Narrated by James Earl Jones speaking in near-biblical cadences, this is a gripping portrait of the earth’s most remarkable annual land migration: 1.5 million wildebeests thundering 500 miles across East Africa’s Serengeti Plain, driven by drought to seek grass and water in northern Kenya (only to return to where they started in Tanzania several months later).

Your basic wildebeest is an ungainly brute, but a massive herd on the move and filmed from above makes for a stunning sight. And, this being Africa, these herbivores are of considerable interest to carnivores such as lions and cheetahs, whose high-speed predations and subsequent snack times are filmed with grisly panache, in IMAX close-up. The film’s numerous animal co-stars include stately giraffes, tubby hippos, elegant cranes, opportunistic vultures, haute couture zebras and mischievous baboons.

Eschewing any cutesy anthropomorphic touches, the narrative sticks close to the “nature, red in tooth and claw” trope, candidly showing the life cycle and struggle for survival of all these impressive beasties. Their greatest challenge—fording the rain-swollen and crocodile-infested Mara River—is captured in all its unsparing brutality. (And hearing that a quarter-million wildebeests don’t survive the trek each year puts our own challenges on those family summer vacations into much-needed perspective.) Africa provides some of the finest and most evocative nature imagery I’ve ever seen. It’s a memorable safari, as only IMAX could provide. M