The Adjuster (1991)

 











Directed by Atom Egoyan

Starring Elias Koteas, Arsinee Khanjian, Maury Chaykin, Gabrielle Rose, David Hemblen and Jennifer Dale


Here is a review that I struggled mightily coming up with a place to start.  I absorbed the entire 100+ minutes of the film and had no idea how to accurately depict how I felt about it.  This involved an exhaustive research regimen by yours truly where I went online and read a bunch of reviews...none of which seemed especially lengthy.  I even looked up the Roger Ebert review, a modestly positive three-star appraisal that went into the absolute bare bones of what it was about and nothing more.  It was one of the most sparse Ebert summaries I've EVER read, and I think that's telling.  My theory?  There just isn't a whole lot IN The Adjuster, and waxing about it for longer than a couple paragraphs feels like masturbation for masturbation's sake.  Since I'm a masochist who likes punishing people, none of that will stop me from delivering my standard eight paragraphs of (maybe) fun material.

The director in question this time around is Atom Egoyan.  I'm familiar with the name, and in going through his filmography I had seen two of his previous efforts.  1994's Exotica is a pretty damn good experiment in voyeurism and the people involved in the voyeurism trade, helped by a fantastic performance from certified hottie Mia Kirshner.  The 1999 thriller Felicia's Journey is one of the best (and more accurate) depictions of a serial killer I've seen in cinema, with a seemingly nurturing psychopath played by Bob Hoskins who befriends and eventually murders young women.  Spoiler alert on that film.  The point is that I've enjoyed other films I've seen by this guy.  When you follow a film-maker's career trajectory, you can see growth, and since The Adjuster was an early effort from Egoyan I can only conclude that he got better with time.  This 1991 arthouse film left me cold in every way that a film can leave a person cold.  Why?  Read up and find out.

The title character of the film is Noah (Elias Koteas), insurance adjuster for an unnamed agency who shows up to assist clients whose houses have just burned down.  The film takes great pains to show just how much Noah cares about his clients, especially the good-looking women.  He nobly sleeps with all of them, mostly at the dingy hotel where he chooses to house them.  He constantly repeats the mantra of his company, dictating the news to his clients about their always oustanding claims with a sort of calm detachment.  The film's poster promises a heaping helping of eroticism, a recurring theme in Egoyan's work, and the one sex scene in the film between Noah and a client who has just lost her home is done in a way that takes the hotness completely out of the act as they discuss the mundane details of her claim.  In a way, the character serves as a modern stand-in for Robin Hood, which is driven into the audience's skull with his penchant for shooting arrows at a real estate sign located near his home.

The other lead is Hera (Arsinee Khanjian), Noah's wife who works as a censor of pornographic films.  While Koteas does his best with the limited dialogue he is given (and his status in my mind as the forever Casey Jones), I found Khanjian's performance to be very limited, her face going from one level of mild concern to another level of mild concern.  It's really a shame, because there is the potential in this character for some really gripping stuff.  She secretly videotapes the movies that her job requires her to watch and is implied to be turned on by them, no doubt a commentary on the hypocrisy of small boards of people who arbitrarily decide what is suitable for public consumption.  These days, we celebrate these folks and call them corporations.  While watching, I couldn't help but think that a film entirely about this character (with perhaps Jennifer Dale, the actress who played Noah's sex scene recipient, in the lead role) with the satire pumped up to 11 could have been electric.

The film is a three-legged table of story structure, and said third leg comes to us in the form of sex pervert ex-footballer Bubba (Maury Chaykin) and his wife (Gabriella Rose).  They like to act out their fantasies in public, and we get one of the more bizarre scenes I've seen in the project thus far where Rose pretends to be a cheerleader for the high school football team.  You haven't lived until you've seen a 36-year-old woman cavorting around for horny teenagers.  If you want to imagine the exploits of these characters, they're essentially a darker version of this:

The one saving grace of The Adjuster occurs in the film-making aspects rather than the screenplay and story structure.  From a visual standpoint, Egoyan does a good job making everything look stark and gray, granting a decent representation to the humdrum existence of this group of wholly unlikable people.  In addition to Koteas, Maury Chaykin is also aces in his role as the sex pervert.  He has one soliloquy during the film that might be the movie's single best scene; it occurs after the character of Bubba has scouted Noah's house as the location for his next project, and it is one of those scenes that lets you know everything about a character without telling you every single aspect of his past.

No matter what praise I throw at The Adjuster, it is about a group of people that I would never, ever want to know.  I CAN like stories where there are no traditional protagonists; Barry Lyndon from this very project comes to mind.  That film, however, was very entertaining and unfolded in a way that made you want to see what happened next.  I did not care, in the least bit, what happened to any of these people.  The script seems to hold a great deal of regard for Noah, viewing him as an idealistic man who does everything he can to help people through difficult situations, but the execution shows us simply a man who seems to be bored in everything he does.  Every time the movie picks up steam, such as the late scene where a rookie censor comes on to Hera during a film viewing, it pulls back, reverting to each character's default status as a depression factory.

The Adjuster is a maddening film, one that actually does have a lot of potential to be something great in my own mind despite every negative thing I've said about it thus far.  The problem is that it is so uneven and unfocused.  It contains three different stories - an insurance adjuster who sleeps with his clients, a censor who secretly enjoys what she is supposed to decry, and a depraved couple who will do anything for sexual thrills - and muddles them together into a mess that never quite gels.  A movie about any ONE of these three stories has the potential to be something very special, especially the censorship angle.  As it stands, the movie is a black hole of substance.  It tries to say so many things that it winds up essentially saying nothing.

Rating time: * out of ****.  Atom Egoyan would go on to do things that I enjoyed a great deal, but this one...ehhhh.  Call it the Dark Star that would eventually give us Halloween.

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