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.
