Guest of Honour (Atom Egoyan, 2019)

I realize it's unfashionable to appreciate Atom Egoyan these days. The official line is that he is "washed up," and this judgment doesn't exactly come from nowhere. In recent years he has made some films of, shall we say, variable quality. It sometimes seems as though he is an artist compelled to keep working, whether or not he necessarily has something pressing to say. But while watching Guest of Honour, I came to feel quite strongly that even a middling Egoyan film is generally better than most things. 

If you're into structure, Egoyan seldom disappoints. At this stage, his work is sort of a ready-made machine, one into which he loads certain contents -- character, muted emotion, memory -- and they are duly sorted out. Guest of Honour, like several other Egoyan films, has a framing device wherein a character is confronted with a questioner of some sort. In this case, it's Father Greg (Luke Wilson), who is speaking with one of the two main characters, Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira), trying to learn about her father Jim (David Thewlis) so he can prepare his eulogy. This allows Veronica to operate as a diegetic narrator.

Also, like many other Egoyan films, Guest of Honour centers around two emotionally wounded individuals whose pathologies inflict damage on each other. Veronica, formerly a high school music teacher, is in prison because she may have had an affair with a student (Alexandre Bourgeois). She refuses her father's help to get her an early release because, in her words, "this is where I belong." Jim, meanwhile, is working to investigate Veronica's case because he doesn't believe she committed the crime. He makes it clear that he gave up on his own dreams to be a better father, closing his restaurant and becoming a health inspector so he could help Veronica pursue her music. It's clear Veronica feels this weight quite acutely, perceiving her relationship with music as being the root of everything that has gone wrong in her life.

These protagonists, with multiple layers of trauma and selfishly concealed secrets regarding their true motives, are classic Egoyan. But rather than feeling annoyed at the familiarity, I found it rather comforting. Thewlis is excellent, playing a variation of Bruce Greenwood's customs inspector from Exotica. His officiousness is a ruse; he behaves from a place of deep devotion as well as crushing loss. What Thewlis brings to the role is what I might call a "failed Britishness," an attempt to remain professionally aloof but always reverting to emotional nakedness, very much against his will.

And what makes Guest of Honour different from previous Egoyan films is the director's expanded trust of his audience. By now, he knows we are a self-selected bunch, and unlike previous works, Guest of Honour leaves many of its "reveals" implicit. We learn why Veronica feels the need to be punished, but the film articulates it almost in passing. Some will find this lazy plotting on Egoyan's part, but instead I found it shorthand for those of us who know how to read Egoyan films. This is a filmmaker who believes, not without reason, that he has build a good machine.