odd choices
by Douglas Messerli
Atom Egoyan (screenplay and director) Guest
of Honour / 2019, USA 2020
Critics quite literally got all stewed-up over
Egyptian-born Canadian director Atom Egoyan’s most recent movie, Guest of
Honor. While Egoyan has in recent years fallen into a kind of story-telling
rut, and given the highly moral texture of most of his films, he has always
been a bit sanctimonious in his exploration of guilt and innocence, including
in one of his best works, The Sweet Hereafter, to describe his most
recent characters as “ludicrous,” as Variety reviewer Guy Lodge did, or
write as The New York Times critic Ben Kenigsberg that the film’s “core
revelations are pretty silly, failing crucial tests of motivation” seems
terribly unforgiving of the highly intelligent cinema-maker who, like so many
other film directors before him, has suffered a short period of diminished
results.
I’m
far more sympathetic of this flawed film, agreeing with Glenn Kenny’s comments
on RogerEbert.com in which he describes the movie as “a gratifyingly
solid work that benefits from first-rate performers.”
It
is true that this version of family guilt and its repercussions is a bit
melodramatically conceived and far more slowly revealed than necessary. Yet
from the earliest of scenes, when the film’s major character, the seemingly
totally honest and level-headed Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira), visits Father
Greg (Luke Wilson) to help him prepare for his comments about her father who
has just died without perhaps ever even attending Greg’s church, but
nonetheless requested to be the site of his funeral, we quickly comprehend that
there are far darker elements concerning this family-based drama than we might
first have imagined.
What we do come to perceive in her encounter with Wilson’s character,
played very much against type, is that the director is purposely withholding
information which might long-ago have relieved some of his confessor’s guilt:
that he has indeed known a great deal more about this case that he has at first
pretended. But it order to explain that, I shall have to break through—dear
reader, I’m warning you—a great deal of the webs of narrative Egoyan has woven
around this late-revealed truth.
Let us simply generalize at first: Veronica’s father, Jim (an excellent
David Thewlis) is desperately in love with his daughter’s Brazilian-born
mother, but as she grows seriously ill, soon after dying, he becomes
involved—at least as the young Veronica (Isabelle Franca) perceives it,
reminding us a little of Henry James’ novel What Maisie Knew—with her
piano teacher, at one point allowing her to hold his hand at Veronica’s piano
recital while he is sitting next to her ailing mother and on several occasions
both of them retreating during Veronica’s lessons for liaisons elsewhere in the
house.
Worse yet, as Veronica grows up, dating a boy which, if I am correct
(it’s hard to know in such knotted plot territory) the teacher’s son Walter
(Gage Munroe), Veronica, to help expunge her childhood guilt, tells the young
man of her childhood refusal to act, after which he determines to and succeeds
in committing suicide by drowning. It’s almost inevitable, accordingly, that
her refusal both times to circumvent death finally is repeated in her refusal
to defend herself—despite the clear evidence that the cellphone proposal to
meet up for sex with her young male student was sent at a time when she was
conducting her orchestra in which that student also performed.
Father Greg finally reveals his bombshell that Veronica’s childhood
teacher was an active member of his congregation, and had confessed to him her
relationship with Veronica’s father— more of a needed friendship than a series
of sexual trysts—which had been sought out and approved by the young girl’s
dying mother.
And
that’s just Veronica’s side of the story. Her food inspector British expatriate
father, as Veronica puts it, also made “several odd choices.” A true
authoritarian when it comes to the rules of the food health board, both on and
off the job, Jim can be both callous and forgiving about the restaurant
negligence he uncovers.
He
is happy to award a new Persian restaurant with the health board’s highest
rating, while being rather callous when he proposes to close down a
long-established Italian restaurant wherein he has discovered a dead rat.
At
an Armenian establishment he discovers an obvious dereliction of the rules, a
pile of dead rabbits, with their ears lobbed off, in the kitchen. Not only has
the restaurant traded in unprocessed food—source unknown—but is cutting off
their ears for another restaurant who serves the delicacy of fried rabbit ears.
It probably doesn’t help that Jim has purchased a live rabbit for his daughter
when she was a child, and is now diligently caring for Benjamin the rabbit
while she is imprisoned.
However, when the proprietor (played by Egoyan’s wife Arsinée
Khanjian) begs him not to write her restaurant up, revealing that the rabbits
are for a private party, not for regular customers, and that, if he wants, she
will keep the ears and serve them up as a delicacy to the party itself, he
overlooks that restaurant’s transgressions.
Yet, at another point the respected inspector becomes a kind of criminal
himself, grinding up rabbit feces to make them appear to be rat pellets which
he sprinkles on the bathroom floor of an otherwise spotless German restaurant
in which he has just pleasantly dined, using the evidence as a kind of bribe so
that he may interview the owner’s young relative who also works there, Clive
(Alexandre Bourgeois), the 17-year-old student who Veronica is accused of
having abused.
Despite his anger over being used (and one might argue, truly abused) in
this situation, and knowing that just a few moments before the inspector had
entered the toilet that he himself had washed the bathroom floor, Clive,
nonetheless, confirms that Veronica was conducting at the very time she was
said to have sent the cell-phone, suggesting that the message must have been
sent instead by the bus driver, at the time supposedly protecting all the
student’s cell-phones.
Invited to the party at the Armenian restaurant, he is asked to say a
few words to the guests. Having already drunk too much, Jim embarrassingly
babbles on, suddenly imagining himself as the “guest of honour,” a role he has
never previously played in his life. His final words, that he will seek out the
guilty bus driver and revenge his daughter’s imprisonment, not only shocks his
audience, however, but results in a visit from police detectives the next
morning.
As
they begin to interrogate him, he suddenly perceives that his daughter’s
long-lived rabbit has died. He returns to the Armenian restaurant, dead rabbit
in hand, to ask them one last favor, to lob off the animal’s feet so that he
might have the symbols they culturally represent of good luck, knowing, at the
same time, that any luck in love or emotional caring has eluded him forever.
Los Angeles, July 15, 2020
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July
2020).
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