I'm going to resist the temptation of asking the obvious question: If Egoyan's wife can't act, why does he put her in all of his films?
Let's get back to the movie. The film is sterile and devoid of any meaningful human reference. Like most of Egoyan's films it dallies in identity and political issues but never achieves what it absolutely must: an ironic detachment from politics. Egoyan shies away from unpolitical folk and their relationships. He can't understand that people's identities are formed inside their bowels.
Related to this is that he has no ear for people's voices and never gives us the words they use. So all we get is fragments of philosophized thought and process that has meaning only to Egoyan.
To compensate for not knowing a human speaker from a college textbook, Egoyan writes gaudy, overblown, and contrived plots which he populates with trendy but stock characters, whose past isn't personal, it's ceremonial.
The hero is a young Canadian daubed in both Christian and Muslim colors; this makes him colorful, but it does not make him real, compelling, grounded, believable, interesting, or worth spending 90 minutes with.
Background? Both his parents were killed in a car accident when he was young but no one knows why or how.
This heritage of the lad is a college test on The Virtues and Problematics of Diversity. But Diversity is a bureaucratic goal, not a human condition, state of mind, or even attitude.
Then, there's the rest of it: Simon is being raised by his uncle who "may or may not" be a racist. Simon's grandfather is a racist and the Islamicity of Simon's father makes grandfather suspect foul play in the death of Simon's mother.
All fascinating, but in real movies, this would be a pretext and a filter over the true plot, involving life. Unhappily, life is a bilogical compound, not a conceit. There is no air and no life in Egoyan's films, just an auteur's recycled mood.
Let's get back to the movie. The film is sterile and devoid of any meaningful human reference. Like most of Egoyan's films it dallies in identity and political issues but never achieves what it absolutely must: an ironic detachment from politics. Egoyan shies away from unpolitical folk and their relationships. He can't understand that people's identities are formed inside their bowels.
Related to this is that he has no ear for people's voices and never gives us the words they use. So all we get is fragments of philosophized thought and process that has meaning only to Egoyan.
To compensate for not knowing a human speaker from a college textbook, Egoyan writes gaudy, overblown, and contrived plots which he populates with trendy but stock characters, whose past isn't personal, it's ceremonial.
The hero is a young Canadian daubed in both Christian and Muslim colors; this makes him colorful, but it does not make him real, compelling, grounded, believable, interesting, or worth spending 90 minutes with.
Background? Both his parents were killed in a car accident when he was young but no one knows why or how.
This heritage of the lad is a college test on The Virtues and Problematics of Diversity. But Diversity is a bureaucratic goal, not a human condition, state of mind, or even attitude.
Then, there's the rest of it: Simon is being raised by his uncle who "may or may not" be a racist. Simon's grandfather is a racist and the Islamicity of Simon's father makes grandfather suspect foul play in the death of Simon's mother.
All fascinating, but in real movies, this would be a pretext and a filter over the true plot, involving life. Unhappily, life is a bilogical compound, not a conceit. There is no air and no life in Egoyan's films, just an auteur's recycled mood.