Movie Review: Guest of Honour

Guest of Honour *** ½ / *****
Directed by: Atom Egoyan.
Written by: Atom Egoyan.
Starring: David Thewlis (Jim), Laysla De Oliveira (Veronica), Luke Wilson (Father Greg), Rossif Sutherland (Mike), Tennille Read (Roseangela), Tamara Podemski (Detective Grove), Gage Munroe (Walter), Arsinée Khanjian (Anna), John Bourgeois (Gunter), Sugith Varughese (Indian Restaurant Manager), Hrant Alianak (Garo), Seamus Patterson (Lenny), Alexandre Bourgeois (Clive), Isabelle Franca (Young Veronica).
 

It is, sadly, hard to think of too many other directors who had such a sustained run of great films that have fallen harder than Atom Egoyan has. Throughout the 1990s and the early part of the 2000s, Egoyan could be counted to make complex movies like The Adjuster, Exotica (which I rewatched last week – and it’s still as brilliant and audacious as ever), The Sweet Hereafter, Felicia’s Journey and Ararat. Hell, I even like Where the Truth Lies and Adoration more than most do, even if in those films, you could tell his usually fine tuned skills weren’t quite operating as good as they had been. But in the last decade, Egoyan has made one dud after another – Chloe, which may have been his attempt to take his version of the erotic thriller mainstream with stars like Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore and Amanda Seyfried, but it just didn’t work, followed by the nadir of his filmography – Devil’s Knot, in which he couldn’t even make a director-for-hire gig work. The Captive had some interesting moments, but never really came together. At least his most recent film before this, Remember (2015) – his Nazi revenge story had great performances by Christopher Plummer, and knew, and embraced, how ridiculous its premise was. Still, fans of Egoyan’s work – and I count myself among them – have been waiting for a decade for something of a return to form.
 
With Guest of Honour, sadly, I think we’re still waiting – but we may at least see some signs that the return to form is still possible. There is no mistaking Guest of Honour for Egoyan’s work (something you probably couldn’t say of his last three films) as Egoyan tries to work out some of those old muscles delving into a story of buried trauma and family secrets, told in a fractured timeline that will supposedly come together in the final minutes. This is what Egoyan did better than anyone else at his peak. Guest of Honour doesn’t work like his best films do – it’s a more than a little too farfetched, not just in terms of its plot, but also in character motiviations for that. But it’s an odd film, that holds you in its grip and makes you want to know what else could possibly happen in this odd film.
 
The film stars David Thewlis as Jim, a lonely, stick-in-the-mud health inspector, who spends his days going to restaurants, and lecturing them about all their health code violations. The only person he is close to is his daughter, Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira), who he visits in jail – she being there for some sort of indiscretion with her students, when she was a young music teacher on a school trip – which we will see play out in flashbacks. The story is told from Veronica’s point-of-view, explaining it to a priest (Luke Wilson), who will be the one presiding over Jim’s funeral. If that’s not enough timelines, we also flash to Veronica as a child – when her mother was dying of cancer, and Jim grew closer to Veronica’s music teacher, which in her mind, meant an affair – who also happens to be the mother of Veronica’s boyfriend, who is angry with her over revealing something about his mother.
 
So there is a lot going on in Guest of Honour. Egoyan used to be able to handle this many timelines, and story fractures with ease – look at Exotica, which had just as many, and came together beautifully, leading up to a final shot that somehow explained everything and nothing all at once. To be fair to Egoyan here – he mostly handles these timelines with ease as well – there’s a lot going on, and some of it is deliberately confusing, because he’s keeping everything vague – but gradually it does in fact come together.
 
If the film doesn’t end up working like Egoyan’s best work though it’s because the characters are as deep or interesting – and their motivations seem murky at best. Vernonica in particular seems like a character who doesn’t act, in pretty much any of the timelines, like any reasonable person would. But she’s also the most interesting character – as Thewlis, who is quite good, is also playing a fairly dull character – someone whose life is sad and lonely, and he only gradually seems to come out of his shell, although it could also lead to his destruction.
 
In short, Guest of Honour is clearly a very odd film – a very Egoyan film. Does it work? I’m not entirely sure it does, but I’m not entirely sure it has to, since it does it’s such an odd duck of a movie, you like it, you’re drawn into, even if it’s all just strange. No, I don’t think Guest of Honour is a return to form for Egoyan – but it’s his first film in a while that makes me think a return to form is possible.