“I wanted to make a film about believable people doing believable things in unbelievable ways.”—Atom Egoyan

I usually take notes on films I review. I like to let characters speak for themselves, rather than simply analyze them. Good films (and even some bad ones) give actors great lines. The reason I’m mentioning this is that I didn’t get a chance to do my homework this month. But it’s not my fault. Honest. Let me explain.

A decade ago I rented one of Atom Egoyan’s early films, The Adjuster (1991), because I’d heard that he was one of Canadian cinema’s up-and-coming young directors. I watched The Adjuster. I hated it. At the time it struck me as one of those art house films that people make to show they can be clever, but forget to instill with any passion or soul. Years went by before I picked up another Egoyan film. The next one was Exotica, which also left me cold. Then came The Sweet Hereafter. I was blown away. Stunned. The Sweet Hereafter was an early choice for this column, and I described it as a high point of English Canadian cinema.

But I didn’t change my mind about the earlier films. I just figured Egoyan had grown into his craft, that he’d dropped the pretentiousness.

Fast forward in time to a couple of weeks ago. I started chewing my way through a movie lover’s banquet called The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made, edited by Peter M Nichols. It’s in alphabetical order by film title, with the original reviews published in the Times when the films opened, and the fifth picture reviewed is…you guessed it…The Adjuster. As I read that review, I was thinking, “Damn, that sounds like a neat movie. Could it possibly be the same one I wrote off ten years ago?” No harm in taking a second look.

This is where the problem came in. I wasn’t really being open-minded—I just wanted to confirm my initial aversion. So, second time around, no notes. Why bother? Fast forward in time 102 minutes. Uh-oh. That actually was a pretty darn good film, wasn’t it? As a matter of fact, I really enjoyed it, didn’t I? Maybe, just maybe, I owe Mr. Egoyan an apology for all those years of making The Adjuster one of my bêtes noires?

A few days after my change of heart, I’m pumped enough about The Adjuster to want to write about it here. Too bad about all those notes I never took…

What made the difference? Several possibilities come to mind, but I think the biggest factor was having a clearer idea of the storyline the second time around. Janet Maslin’s Times review gave me that. Not having to decipher the narrative puzzle left me free to focus on the acting, the dynamics of the characters, the backgrounds, the individual camera shots, and the music (an eerie blend of western & oriental themes). Sometimes a review can wreck a film by revealing too much; The Adjuster is one of those cases where forewarned is fortuitous. So let me give some stuff away.

The movie is about a kind ghoul. His name is Noah Render, and his job is to come in after fires or other disasters have laid waste to people’s earthly belongings, and settle their insurance claims as surgically as possible. I’m deliberately mixing metaphors here. Surgeons and ghouls would seem to have limited compatibility. Bear with me.

Noah’s clients treat him like they would a doctor who holds their lives in his hands. As he often almost literally does. He’s got some of that unshakeable Olympian calm that patients look for in their doctors before they go under the knife. He comforts them. He is their rock. He alone knows the path through the intricacies of Insurance Law which will guide them to the Final Salvation of the Settled Claim. With the smoke of disaster still in the air, Noah appears at their side like a desolation angel and whispers: “You’re in shock—even if it doesn’t feel like it.” And his alone becomes the god-like task of, first, reconstructing shattered lives from traumatized memories & salvaged photos and, second, “sorting things out, deciding what has value and what doesn’t.” Again, every bit the surgeon, whose deft scalpel snicks away between life and death.

Too bad he’s still a ghoul. That word comes from Arabic folklore, describing a desert spirit that preys on corpses. Noah feeds on the corpses of his clients’ pasts. To do this, he must first ensure that those clients do not leave him. He must become a Collector. Every grieving soul is offered an all-expenses-paid stay in a motel of Noah’s choosing. It’s his own twisted Ark. They’re all there in one place: the old couple whose entire future Noah holds in a file folder; the young woman he seduces, whose claim he itemizes as they’re making love; the gay man who….Well, let’s save a few surprises….

Noah’s hunger doesn’t include his own wife, Hera (Arsinée Khanjian) and his child, and the refugee sister-in-law who lives with them. As he does his nightly motel rounds, they are left to fend for themselves in a lonely castle of a house squatting in the midst of acres of stripped land in a subdivision that was never built. It’s a pretty close suburban approximation of hell. Noah spends more time shooting random arrows out of his bedroom window than he does talking to his family.

The emotional lockdown is destroying Hera. She works as a censor for the Ontario Board of Classification, spending her days coding unspeakable acts in darkened screening rooms and warehouses filled with crates of pornographic flotsam. With a hidden video camera, she secretly records the things that cannot be shown; to be replayed later by her sister as some kind of catharsis for horrors in her past. A slimy co-worker (Don McKellar) and cast-iron boss (David Hemblen) ensure that a difficult situation becomes impossible.

As Hera and Noah, Khanjian and Koteas give us the perfect portrait of how emotional addictions, whatever form they may take, kill intimacy. Passion is still there; it’s just horribly displaced. Their two lives start running on parallel tracks full speed into oblivion.

As if the main story weren’t potent enough, there’s an intersecting one involving a wealthy couple, Bubba and Mimi (Maury Chaykin, Gabrielle Rose) who devise increasingly outlandish psychosexual role-playing games. We first meet them in a subway train, with Bubba as a slobbering derelict and Mimi as the Chanel-clad socialite who lets him grope her. Games can be a kind of therapy; they can also be desperate attempts to reconnect with souls that have been set adrift. Pretending to talk of some fictitious backers who he claims want to rent Noah and Hera’s house for a movie shoot, Bubba describes himself: “They have everything they want, or they have the means to have everything they want, but they don’t know what they need.” I’ve always admired Maury Chaykin as an actor, and The Adjuster gives him a role to die for.

Atom Egoyan warps and wefts the two stories of Noah & Hera and Bubba & Mimi with consummate skill. The film’s climax is an emotional holocaust. This time I got it. Better late than never. I’m not going to forget those final few minutes for a very long time. One thing worries me, though. If I was so wrong about this film being bad, could another viewing turn an old favorite into coal?

Looking Back & Second Thoughts

“So many places you see, you wouldn’t think twice about, they pass right through you. And then, for no reason, you can see a house, and find yourself wondering, what is going on inside of those walls.” – Bubba

“You’re in shock–even if it doesn’t feel like it.” – Noah, the adjuster

Given that Double Indemnity–one of the very best noirs, in both book & movie incarnations–has an insurance salesman as its protagonist, should anyone be surprised that one of Canada’s best film directors was able to get a lot of dramatic mileage out of the life of an insurance claims adjuster? Egoyan is the closest the Canadian film industry has come to having its own Ingmar Bergman–a multi-talented creator (writer, director, producer, actor) working consistently & independently with the same team of exceptional professionals (actors, cinematographers, art directors, production designers, editors, composers) over decades. Always the best of the best. The Adjuster has grown on me over the years. The first time I saw the film I’d never seen anything quite like before; I was both intrigued and annoyed. The annoyance is long gone. On my latest viewing, just prior to preparing this Seldom Scene entry for posting, the experience was the same as I I’ve felt rereading perfectly crafted short stories for the nth time. It doesn’t hurt that The Adjuster covers almost every major theme running through Canadian film & literature: loneliness, isolation, strange sex, black humor, identity crises, need, loss, survival, mind games, ennui, and psychosis. The only thing missing is harsh weather–preferably a winter storm. In a revealing interview included with The Adjuster DVD, Egoyan himself says that his film works because “it’s absurd and it’s extreme, yet it’s within the realm of reality. It has drawn itself to this weird state….” He describes how his films’ low budgets allow him to retain complete control over his work, which in turn allows him to take chances with his characters. They are complicated, complex, and draw the viewer into their lives. Again, this depth is reminiscent of the work of a gifted short story writer such as Alice Munro.

Here are some fragments of reviews of The Adjuster by Canadian film critics:

From Katherine Monk’s Weird Sex & Snowshoes and other Canadian film phenomena (2001):

“Surreal, and yet strangely funny, The Adjuster is a tale of several maladjusted people just trying to find a little pleasure in a cold and hostile environment. CANADIAN CHECKLIST: Weird sex | Empty landscape | Language barriers | Voyeurism | Internal demons | Dysfunctional marriage | Missing items (in this case from fire) | Personal alienation | Humour is based in irony | Symbolic reference to “colonies” and “freezing” (at the wart doctor’s)

From George Melnyk’s One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema (2004):

“The Adjuster was described by Egoyan as a film ‘about believable [read ordinary] people doing believable things in an unbelievable [read abnormal] way.’ One scholar of his films has observed that his films do not contain the social reality ‘found in tourist brochures.’

Exposing familiar and individual dysfunction has become his trademark in a way that seems to parallel Cronenberg’s exploration of the dark recesses of the mind and technology. Egoyan’s juxtaposing of the bizarre with the ordinary cuts through the surface of human relations to some hidden darkness, as do Cronenberg’s films, except that in Egoyan’s films there are no specially effects and no twisted manifestations of the living. It is the very ordinariness of his characters that is frightening. Not taking anything for granted is suggested in the eeriness of the music, by the introspective faces of the actors, whose eyes (and dialogue) do not quite connect with the world, by the dark colours that bathe his scenes, and in the events whose rationality is constructed in such a way as to disturb the viewer. The actors in his films present their characters in a cold and distant manner that is unsettling to filmgoers accustomed to the emotional releases of melodrama. While Cronenberg let the excesses of the id spill out in a perverse and grotesque world of rampant parasites, exploding heads, and ghoulish medical instruments, Egoyan holds the instinctual inside firmly under artistic control, so that psychological perversion only emerges gradually.”

From William Beard’s essay on Exotica, in Jerry White’s anthology The Cinema of Canada (2006):

“In the first part of the film [Exotica, but also The Adjuster] viewers are baffled by what connection many of the people and events have to each other, but connections begin to show themselves gradually, the inexorably, as the action proceeds. What seems arbitrary turns out to be determined and even overdetermined. And, in a parallel movement, the guesses we make about how things are connecting and why people are acting as they do form another unfolding process (like a striptease, as Egoyan himself has remarked in the film’s press kit), which, however, is full of misdirection and false clues, so that we find ourselves constantly having to revise our guesses, often drastically, in the light of new information, right to the last scene of the film. This is a scenario familiar from some of Egoyan’s earlier films, notably The Adjuster, carried here to climactic heights. At the end of the film the pieces have all locked together to paint a picture complex in itself and full of reverberations and further suggestions that leave the viewer still working on the puzzle.”

From Take One’s Essential Guide to Canadian Film (2001), edited by Wyndham Wise:

“This amoral yet compassionate protagonist who lives with his film censor wife…in a barren, unfinished suburban development is one of Egoyan’s most strangely compelling creations. Egoyan’s effective use of wide screen portrays the terrifying abyss that separates Noah from everyone he encounters. The Adjuster–a haunting drama of disconnection and desire–is a searching re-interpretation of Luis Buñuel’s Nazarin, with distant echoes of Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice.”