Atom Egoyan's latest film, the oddly and unhelpfully titled "Adoration," demonstrates in style, subject, and theme, a number of the director's persistent concerns. Whether based on an original script, like "Exotica," or on another literary source, like "The Sweet Hereafter" or "Felicia's Journey," his movies deal with the search for meaning and ultimately, reconciliation in some unusual, frequently troubled familial relationships. The particular disturbances often grow out of some tragedy in the past, which the narrative probes through layers of confusion and deception.

Beginning with a strange and misleading voice-over narration, "Adoration" continues Egoyan's preoccupation with family, tragedy, and the mysteries of the past. Flickering back and forth in time, the film opens with the image of a young boy watching his mother play the violin at a lovely lakeside, a memory that the boy, the narrator of this moment, now older, recounts in an essay he reads to his high school French class. The boy, Simon (Devon Bostick), reveals that his father planted a bomb in his then-pregnant mother's luggage, set to blow up in an airplane en route to Israel; if the airport security officers had not found the bomb, 400 people would have perished and Simon would never have been born.

When Simon posts the essay on the Internet, it ignites another explosion, with friends and classmates crowding his chat room and arguing about the ethics of martyrdom and murder; their parents soon weigh in, adding even more fuel to the fire. The babble of voices and the amplification of emotion drown out the truth, that Simon in fact invented the story for reasons of his own, including the need to come to terms with the deaths of his mother and father some eight years earlier.

As the picture jumps around, a number of stories, all connected to Simon and his parents, emerge. His dying grandfather talks about his daughter's brilliance and talent, contrasting her gifts with the obstinacy and anger of her brother Tom (Scott Speedman), who has taken care of Simon since his parents' deaths. The story grows even more complicated when Simon's teacher Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian) encourages him to read his essay at a school dramatic event, in the process involving herself in his life.

Typically of Egoyan's work, the film constantly moves back and forth in time, sometimes showing flashbacks within flashbacks, stories within stories, confusing the audience with those fraternal twins, fantasy and memory. The concentric, intersecting, and overlapping circles of relationship create a kind of eccentric architecture of deception, so that the narrative resolves itself into an ongoing series of revelations, suggesting that truth constitutes a scarce commodity in the commerce of human connection.

In addition to its focus on Simon's family and his attempts to learn about his parents, the script touches on some larger issues, especially the endless tragedy of the Middle East and the tensions among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. In a flashback Simon's grandfather mentions the September 11, 2001 attacks in an argument with Simon's father, Sami, a Lebanese; his teacher also comes from Lebanon, a fact that grows increasingly important as the various stories begin to connect.

"Adoration" also displays some less pleasing characteristics of the Egoyan style, including a tendency toward a uniformly deadpan acting style, so that all the major performers underplay with a brooding and irritating flatness. In contrast, the insistent, melodramatic musical score, which leans heavily on a lugubrious cello, overemphasizes just about all the emotional scenes and sequences without any differentiation, virtually instructing the audience in how to react, and thus diluting and even dissolving significance - if every action or gesture operates at the same high level of meaning, then nothing achieves any particular distinction or importance.

Despite its frequent flashbacks within flashbacks and a few memorable images, the film too often descends into a resolute, persistent dullness. The talky script frequently repeats itself and characters spend far too much time in conversation, rehashing familiar matters or disclosing shocking information in lifeless monotones. Finally, and I hope our good neighbors to the north will forgive me, in its uninteresting locations, its general appearance, the solemnity of its tone, and the earnest stolidity of its thematic statements, for good or for bad, "Adoration" seems indelibly Canadian.

Adoration

(R), written and directed by Atom Egoyan.

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