The Adjuster

Dir: Atom Egoyan

1991

****

The Adjuster is, quite typically from director Atom Egoyan's earlier work, a somewhat surreal and disjointed venture. There two interweaving stories at play here. The first involves the adjuster of the title, played by Elias Koteas. An insurance adjuster is someone who helps victims of house fires to cope with their loss and to relocate them and to make sure they are financially taken care of. Elias Koteas' Noah Render takes his responsibilities further than this and regularly visits his clients (all who he has relocated to the same motel) and sleeps with them. Over time he loses himself in their collective grief and fast becomes a victim of his own situation. He soon becomes distant from his family, all of who live with him in a single house in the middle of an abandoned housing development. Meanwhile, Noah's wife finds her work as a pornographic film censor harder as her boss and colleague suggest she enjoys her work for all the wrong reasons and pressure her further the more she protests that she doesn't. In contrast to the family's struggles, we follow Mimi and Bubba. Mimi lives in a fantasy world that Bubba creates for her. Bubba approaches Noah's family in order to make a movie in their desolate house for one of Mimi's bizarre fantasies. The film is a meditation on what makes us individual, our values and morals and how both build our character. It's surreal, dreamlike and contemplative and beautifully realised. It's almost hypnotic, the direction beautiful but slow-paced and the performances subtle but intriguing. I'm somewhat surprised that it is widely considered to be in the top ten best Canadian films of all time (as voted by the Toronto International Film Festival) but I would say it's definitely one of their best from the decade and a good example of what I love about 90s films.