Filmmakers as ambitious and idealistic as the Canadian director Atom Egoyan are today an endangered species. They deserve to be protected, no matter how costly or inconvenient the process may be.
”The Adjuster,” Egoyan`s latest feature (made in 1991, it is just now opening at the Music Box Theater), is not a successful film, though, like Wim Wenders` recent disappointment ”Until the End of the World,” it fails in honorable ways-on the side of artistic aspiration rather than commercial compromise. Whatever else he may be, Egoyan is not out to make a quick buck.
Not, at any rate, with this virtually unsummarizable collection of images, asides and plot fragments, staged largely in the suburban wasteland around Toronto.
At the center of the film is an elaborate structural opposition between two highly metaphorical couples.
Noah (Elias Koteas) is a concerned, rather creepily soft-spoken young man who makes his living as an insurance adjuster, carefully evaluating the material loss suffered by his clients (largely fire victims) while also attending, as a sort of priest-therapist-lover, to their emotional needs.
Where Noah`s claim forms attempt to quantify and scrupulously evaluate the pain suffered by his clients, his wife, Hera (strikingly played by Egoyan`s wife, Arsinee Khanjian), is engaged in a similar attempt to document and classify human desire. She is a censor, passing her days in a screening room and punching her reactions into a firmly gripped handset.
Where Noah and Hera are collectors and observers, Bubba (Maury Chaykin)
and his companion Mimi (Gabrielle Rose) are doers. Apparently a well-to-do retired football player, Bubba devotes his considerable fortune to realizing Mimi`s sexual fantasies.
Bubba rents a stadium so Mimi can dress up as a cheerleader, and seduce an entire football team. And later, posing as a filmmaker, Bubba rents Noah and Hera`s picture-perfect home (the only completed house in a bankrupt development, it stands alone in an icy field), so that Mimi can indulge her fantasy of being a happy housewife with designs on the local Cub Scout troop. In addition to the movies being watched and the movies being made, the characters are continuously passing around photographs, some of them pornographic (the property of a male model, who seemingly has designs on Noah), but most of them nostalgic, depicting lost properties, lost homelands, lost relationships.
As desperate as the characters are to capture human feeling and hold on to it, in the form of lists or images, they all remain lonely and stricken, unable to genuinely communicate with each other.
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It is a bleak vision, and Egoyan has staged it with a solemnity that often backfires on him, producing laughs where none was intended. The characters, barely more than symbols, seem trapped in a world of metaphor, where nothing is concrete and no real drama can take place.
As powerful as some of the isolated images are-there is Noah, shirtless, taking his morning exercise by shooting an arrow out of his bedroom window, and into the bland dream of bourgeois stability represented on a billboard across the way-they often seem unrelated to the immediate goings-on. They are poetic ”touches,” painfully self-conscious and heavily applied.
Far more subtle and satisfying is Egoyan`s use of space-in the way he establishes the courtyard motel where Noah harbors his clients, in the cathedral-like interior that serves as the headquarters of the censorship board, in Noah and Hera`s single, forlorn house poised at the edge of the city.
”The Adjuster” is accomplished but airless.
”THE ADJUSTER” (STAR)(STAR)
Directed and written by Atom Egoyan; photographed by Paul Sarossy; production designed by Linda Del Rosario and Richard Paris; edited by Susan Shipton;
sound design by Steven Munro; music by Mychael Danna; co-produced by Camelia Frieberg. An Orion Classics release; opens July 24 at the Music Box Theatre. Running time: 1:42. MPAA rating: R. Adult situations, strong language, brief nudity.
THE CAST
Noah…………………………………………………Elias Koteas
Hera……………………………………………..Arsinee Khanjian
Bubba……………………………………………….Maury Chaykin
Mimi……………………………………………….Gabrielle Rose
Arianne……………………………………………..Jennifer Dale