FELICIA'S JOURNEY (Artisan) Starring: Bob Hoskins, Elaine Cassidy, Arsinee Khanjian, Peter McDonald, Gerard McSorley. Screenplay: Atom Egoyan, based on the novel by William Trevor. Producer: Bruce Davey. Director: Atom Egoyan. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (adult themes, profanity, sexual situations) Running Time: 116 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Without revealing too much, it's fair to say that Joseph Hilditch (Bob Hoskins) is not what he appears to be. As catering manager for a factory in England's industrial midlands, he is respected for his attention to detail and the affection he brings to his food. At home, however, he is a middle-aged bachelor who spends his nights preparing elaborate recipes from videotapes of a 1950s cooking show hosted by his mother Gala (Arsinee Khanjian). When he shows interest in helping Felicia (Elaine Cassidy), a pregnant 17-year-old Irish girl looking for her boyfriend, it seems to be the act of a kindly, altruistic fellow. Then again, it may not.
FELICIA'S JOURNEY, adapted by Atom Egoyan from William Trevor's novel, is an investigation into relationship pathology that works beautifully while those pathologies remain enigmatic. For the first half of the film, Egoyan darts and weaves through time and place, showing us both of the principal characters searching for someone to cling to. The naive young Felicia, seduced by a young man who shows her the first individual attention of her life, finds it impossible to believe that her Johnny would have deceived her when he left Ireland without giving her an address. Her search is clearly doomed from the start, but no less doomed than the quest of Mr. Hilditch. He too seeks someone who will pay him individual attention, bringing a series of troubled young girls into his confidence and videotaping them for future reference. When the girls no longer need his help, he's left to take other measures to keep them from leaving.
There's plenty of rich psychological material in the intersection of these two characters, and Egoyan keeps it compelling for much of the running time. His compositions (aided by Paul Sarossy's cinematography) continue to be among the more hypnotic in modern cinema, whether lingering over Irish landscapes, visiting Hilditch's troubled childhood or watching Felicia wander in a strange land. Bob Hoskins' performance anchors the material, creating a character that keeps the audience off balance. Hilditch is a manipulator, but he's also a wounded soul who manages to convince himself he's doing the right thing for other people. When Hoskins wants you to feel for Hilditch, you'll feel for him. When he wants you to fear Hilditch (as in one nerve-wracking glare directly at the audience), you'll fear him.
Hilditch develops in so many unexpected ways that the film's resolution can only come as a disappointment. Egoyan is incapable of letting FELICIA'S JOURNEY become a simple genre film, but he's stuck with genre conventions all the same (though why he assented to Mychael Danna's clanking, ham-fisted instrumental score, I have no idea). The finale, a confrontation between Hilditch and a robotically sincere Christian missionary (Claire Benedict), does have a wonderfully twisted humor to it, as the missionary finds herself incapable of dealing with a real soul in torment when she finds one. As a dramatic climax, however, it's unsatisfying, a deus-by-proxy ex machina way for Hilditch's eyes to be opened. And Egoyan should henceforth resist the temptation to close his films with explicatory voice-overs (see also: THE SWEET HEREAFTER).
Those flaws might have crushed another film, but FELICIA'S JOURNEY gets off to too solid a start. I still found myself piecing together the connections between Hilditch's past and his present after the film was through, and pondering the circumstances that allow one unhappy person to grow and heal while another collapses into a fantasy world. Hoskins' performance alone makes FELICIA'S JOURNEY worthy watching; it's just a shame that such a subtle performance ends with such melodrama. "Things take a turn," Hilditch ominously intones at one point, which could easily summarize FELICIA'S JOURNEY. It's a turn that wrings simple quality from potential brilliance.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 insti-caters: 7.
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