FELICIA'S JOURNEY (director/writer: Atom Egoyan; screenwriter: based on the novel by William Trevor; cinematographer: Paul Sarossy; editor: Susan Shipton; cast: Elaine Cassidy (Felicia), Bob Hoskins (Joseph Ambrose Hilditch), Claire Benedict (Miss Calligary), Brid Brennan (Mrs. Lysaght), Arsinee Khanjian (Gala), Peter McDonald (Johnny Lysaght), Gerard McSorley (Felicia's Father), Sheila Reed (Iris), Danny Turner (Young Hilditch), 1999-Can.)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
Inspired by the 1994 novel by William Trevor, this is a film about a serial killer that promised to be more inspiring than it turned out, even though it is an excellently crafted film and has more to offer than the usual serial killer film does. It studied a warped man from when he was seen as a child smothered by his mother's overbearing presence, as she was more interested in her career than she was in him, and then the film shows him as he is now, a respected member of his community but a very lonely man. It, somehow, takes a familiar journey down this director's path even if it seems the director is drifting off into foreign territory. The innovative Canadian of Armenian descent, Atom Egoyan, who has in the past covered such familiar themes as he does here, revisits the themes of betrayal, familial ills, religious conflicts, sexual secrets, videotapes, and uncertain identities.
The film loses its intensity somewhere along the time a naive, unfortunate young Irish girl leaves her home in lush County Cork to come to industrial Birmingham, England, in search of her boyfriend who is seeking work there. Her main reason for coming is to tell the one she loves, that he made her pregnant and she wants the baby. When there, she will meet a seemingly altruistic stranger who it turns out is a serial killer.
Felicia (Cassidy) is desperate and alienated, after hearing from her embittered Irish nationalist widowed father rant on that her boyfriend Johnny is a traitor to Ireland, that he lied to her by not telling her he joined the British army, and that she is carrying in her a child who is the enemy of Ireland. She foolishly believes that her Johnny is working in the industrial Midland's of England, in a lawnmower factory. She gets some money to make the journey there in search of him from her dying great-grandmother, after receiving no letters from him and of being rebuffed by Johnny's mother, as she throws the letters Felicia gives her to send to Johnny in the fire, after reading them and sneering.
The bedraggled Felicia can't find Johnny in the polluted city of Birmingham, but Joseph Ambrose Hilditch (Hoskins), on a shopping spree, meets her when she asks for directions and he chats her up, and the next day, he gives her a lift to a place where he says a lot of Irish lads work. He is a lonely gourmet catering manager in a factory, who forms this odd relationship with this young girl based on his need to talk with someone outside of work.
While she looks for Johnny in the factory, he goes through her backpack and steals her money. When he is driving Felicia, there are flashbacks of other girls he befriended and rode in the same car with and with whom he recorded their conversations, which we disturbingly hear, and even though it is not shown what eventually happened to them, it is eerily certain that Hilditch acts to befriend these helpless prostitutes or runaway girls, secretly videotaping them, to then kill them when they don't need him anymore and try to leave.
The film is adept at using flashbacks from both Felicia's and Hilditch's dysfunctional childhoods, to show how innocent and angelic she is, and how troubled and confused he is, and how she comes from a poor background raised without a mother and he from a wealthy family raised by a mother who used him to promote her cooking show. Hilditch lives alone in the large clapboard house he inherited from his mother, and surrounds himself with 1950s memorabilia, including Mix Masters, and listens to syrupy Mantovani music and artless ballads like "My Special Angel," which are on LP's. He watches videos in his kitchen while he is cooking the same food he sees on the videotapes. The videos are of his sophisticated French mother Gala, who was a famous TV host of a cooking show in the 1950s, and the videos also show him performing with her, appearing as a fat and awkward child. He is now a stout, balding man, in his fifties, who is friendly and respected at his workplace as a man with impeccable culinary taste.
After leaving Hilditch, Felicia is approached by a Jamaican Christian missionary (Claire Benedict), who has big shiny teeth like a wolf. She talks her into staying at their organization's shelter. Felicia notices her money is missing while there, and the missionary people react negatively to her saying that they might have stolen her money. She is then forced back into the house of Hilditch, and we see how the two troubled souls relate to each other in a heartbreaking way.
The crux of the film centers around her reactions from the stern rejection from her father and Johnny's mother, and of being ignored by Johnny. The missionary who is in the business of saving souls, is shown to be full of words that are robotically recited, because when she has a chance to save the helpless Felicia, she doesn't even try. Curiously, the only warmth and help Felicia receives, is from Hilditch, and he is the one who wants to kill her.
Elaine Cassidy captures the character's youthful naivity and quiet determination to get on with her life despite the upheavals in it, as she is seen as too inexperienced and vulnerable for all the evil there is she has to face in the place she was born in and the foreign place she traveled to. She has come to England as an innocent, but after her abortion, she is no longer completely innocent, though she still remains ignorant of her situation.
Bob Hoskins performance is brilliantly mannered, even if he chews the scenery to gain such control, but, nevertheless, he is engaging as a manipulative predator and someone who could be both charming and frightening. His performance has the proper mixture of terror for what he has become and sympathy for what he hasn't become.
What fails this otherwise competent and worthwhile production, is that everything falls too easily into psychological place by the film's end. We are led to believe we understand too much about this serial killer and that he can be redeemed, but the reality is, that we understand too little about him, despite the appropriate effort that is made to understand him. When the nature of the relationship Hoskins has in mind with Felicia becomes obvious, the film can't recover from this knowledge and it becomes more natural for the audience to care that the angelic Cassidy somehow survives what is intended her, rather than the film going into deeper and more unfamiliar ground. This serial killer film falls below the achievements of M and Peeping Tom, as it falls into the range of films that miss their mark but are still enriching.
REVIEWED ON 5/27/2000 GRADE: B-
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
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