FELICIA'S JOURNEY
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Artisan Entertainment Director: Atom Egoyan Writer: Atom Egoyan from a novel by William Trevor Cast: Claire Benedict, Brid Brennan, Elaine Cassidy, Sidney Cole, Bob Hoskins, Arsinee Khanjian, Peter McDonald, Gerard McSorley, Danny Turner
The terrible price that individuals from dysfunctional families must sometimes pay has been a favorite topic of playwrights and other writers since the Greeks. Clytemnestra kills her husband for coming home with a fortune teller. Medea murders her two children to punish her straying husband. Hamlet kills his uncle for the murder of Hamlet's father. In more recent times, Sam Mendes electrified the film world with "American Beauty," about the ultimate price that Lester Burnham pays soon after his loins are inflamed by a high-school cheerleader. But few contemporary films delve into the depths of loneliness and despair as sincerely as "Felicia's Journey." The movie centers on an otherwise gentle, unremarkable person whose conflicted relationship with his mother turns him into a serial killer.
"Felicia's Journey," an adaptation of William Trevor's quiet thriller of the same name, is the story of an association between two people who are of different ages and from diverse backgrounds but who share a pattern of self-delusion that drives each of them to obsessive behavior. For the younger of the pair, the fixation is painful to bear, like the anguish felt by a betrayed lover in Victor Hugo's "The Story of Adele H." For the more mature individual, the lifelong yearning for connection leads to serial murder, to a progression of crimes of which the killer has no memory.
The titled Felicia of the story has taken a journey from a remote village in Ireland's County Cork to the highly industrialized English city of Birmingham. More important is her psychological excursion, from the naivete of a guileless young woman to a person who becomes aware of the ways of the world and reconciles herself to the reality. Joseph Ambrose Hilditch, a catering manager in a large Birmingham factory, takes a similar journey of self-realization, and while his outcome is not as sunny, he is at last able to come to terms with his true nature.
The film is written and directed by the remarkable Atom Egoyan. Egoyan set the movie-mavens' world on fire two seasons ago with "The Sweet Hereafter," about a tenacious lawyer who travels to a remote Canadian village trying to sign up the survivors of a terrible bus accident which took the lives of many children. Like that elliptical tale with its many flashbacks and dream-like sequences, "Felicia's Journey" takes a patient, methodical approach, with frequent closeups to the faces of the two principals evoking the complex, mostly confused, emotions that they feel. Essentially a two-character story, the movie never has the claustrophobic feel of a filmed play because Egoyan leaves his native Canada for the first time to cast his camera's lens across the expansive greenery of rural Ireland, which he contrasts with the smoldering smokestacks and the ominous nuclear power plant of a nightmarishly industrialized Midlands city. Similarly, he displays the bustle of everyday life as seen by one character and suddenly swaps scenes to portray the commotion in the life of the other.
Until we become aware of the monster that inhabits the soul of Joseph Hilditch (Bob Hoskins), we cannot help liking him. He's a roly-poly man, a catering manager in a large food factory who is not only well-liked by his employees but highly respected for his opinions about the food which they prepare. Their affection for him is not difficult to understand: in one scene he gently chastises a man who is trying to sell him a machine that can do everything that a series of cooks now perform, but Hilditch would not think of firing human beings, whose preparation of food is an act of love to the diners. Hilditch lives in a large house by himself, preparing his own dinners under the videotaped instruction of a TV chef, Gala (Arsinee Khanjian), who we learn is his mother-- whose 1950s programs now exist in the extensive library of tapes that Hilditch maintains along with far more sinister videos.
His loneliness comes to a temporary halt when he runs into a similarly forsaken person, the young Felicia (Elaine Cassidy), who has been seduced and impregnated by a young man, Johnny (Peter McDonald), and whom she now seeks in Birmingham. Since he did not leave her his address, she depends on the kindness of the strange Hilditch to help her find the boy, and the connection that Hilditch and Felicia enjoy temporarily lifts both from their misery. Egoyan takes us all on a psychological journey involving two lost souls, an excursion which is wholly original, thought- provoking, involving, and searing.
If Atom Egoyan lucked out two years ago by employing two greater actors--Ian Holm and Sarah Polley to depict two haunted individuals--his good fortune continues this time around as well. Bob Hoskins, turning in the achievement of his career, portrays a tormented man so subtly, so bereft of obvious Hollywood-style melodrama, that our hearts go out to him while we are simultaneously repulsed by the sick acts that his diseased soul compels him to perform. His Hilditch becomes the person we all know from work, from school, from right next-door: the kindly, unobtrusive, considerate person who we'd swear could not hurt a fly. His pairing with Elaine Cassidy as the lovesick girl frantically searching for the boy who lied to her is surely as recognizable to each of us. Gullible, impressed by a guy's convincing line, she has no memory of the hundreds of similar women whose lives have been portrayed in novels and films, women who have been tricked by rogues with one thing on their minds. Her not quite typically Irish features display a bevy of emotions--her expressions of shyness, trust, confusion, and anger as easy to read as a road map of midtown Manhattan. Egoyan's supporting cast add considerable depth and credibility to the tale, particularly Felicia's dour dad who rejects his daughter as a whore who has slept with the enemy and Hilditch's cheery mom who is not ashamed to embarrass her boy and show affection equally while they share a TV screen but who treats him like excess baggage when off the stage.
If commercial American filmmakers got their hands on this piece of work and tried to fashion it into an American-style thriller, the picture would be corrupted so extensively that it would become another been-there-done-that. In its present form, "Felicia's Journey" not only might convince you that the Canadian filmmakers can do no wrong but could give you faith that vital movies are indeed possible without the distorting endowment of Hollywood's hand. "Felicia's Journey" was appropriately selected as the closing work of the 1999 New York Film Festival.
Rated PG-13. Running Time: 114 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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