THE ADJUSTER
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney
THE ADJUSTER is a Canadian film directed and written by Atom Egoyan. It stars Elias Koteas, Arsinee Khanjian, Maury Chaykin, and Gabrielle Rose. It is rated R for sexual situations.
THE ADJUSTER has moved from the recent Seattle International Film Festival to a theatrical run in this town. By all reports it was one of the successes of the Festival. Atom Egoyan is the Armenian-Canadian director of FAMILY VIEWING and SPEAKING PARTS. This new film is being marketed as a black comedy. Don't you believe it! It is a serious movie about values, seeking values, defining values, putting the price on values, as it were. In doing this, Egoyan weaves together three stories, each one of which out-Lynches David Lynch at every turn for bizarre situations and unlikely plot turns. This is a strange, ambiguous movie never goes out of its way to explain itself, but I doubt you will find much that is comedic about it, even though it is witty and canny as hell. You will likely find it fascinating and surprising right to the end.
Elias Koteas plays Noah Render, the insurance adjuster who devotes himself utterly and compulsively to the needs of his clients, who all seem to be victims of fires. He takes charge of their lives while they are in the bureaucratic limbo of waiting to get their claims processed. He puts them up in the same motel, he visits them daily, he even sleep with them if that's what they need. Amy Taubin in the Village Voice calls him a "compassion junkie", which pretty much says it. Of course, what an insurance adjuster does is determine the value of what is lost. His fallacy is thinking that what is lost can be regained, but he determinedly tries to put a value on everything, even in coito.
He lives in a model home in a bankrupt housing development that otherwise consists of scalped ground and signs showing the house that will never be built there. He shares this house with Hera, her Armenian-speaking sister, and Hera's young son. You might think you understand the relationships here, but there's a chance you're wrong.
Hera, played by Arsinee Khanjian, is a censor. She spends her days viewing apparently horrific pornographic films and classifying the ways each violates some code of moral values. Her sister has taken an interest in her work, too.
Then there is the story of Bubba and Mimi (played by Maury Chaykin and Gabrielle Rose, respectively). Was Bubba a filthy street person Mimi assaults on the subway, or is it one of her elaborate, kinky fantasies? As Bubba explains later, "They have everything, or at least the means to have everything, they want, but they don't know what they need, so they try different things." Their ultimate try-out results in, inter alia, uniting the three threads of the film.
THE ADJUSTER gets off to one of those starts where you think the film is never going to let you in on its secrets, but it does at its own pace. I think the pace could have been tighter, but that's just about my only cavil. The pacing problem is a problem at all because the characters are all so emotionally dead; most of the time they brood. Bubba and Mimi are pretty lively, but even Bubba can express himself only with pauses you could drive a Mack truck through. The actors are uniformly excellent.
I can cheerfully recommend THE ADJUSTER to any fan of Egoyan or Wim Wenders, whose style makes similar demands of the viewer. It is an odd movie, but a uniquely satisfying one, one you will think and talk about some time to come.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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