Ararat

This is a very flawed movie by a well-regarded director.

One major problem is the star-role presence of his ubiquitous (in his films) wife, who can't act well and simply cannot use her voice expressively or effectively. Her monotonic droning, in film after film, is irritating.

Another is that he doesn't have the directorial chops to film in an epic style such as the Armenian battle scenes require.

The lopsided voting pattern here seems to be the result of ethnocentric ballot-box stuffing. All those "10"s could only mean that thousands of Egoyan's compatriots have invaded the board and voted politically rather than esthetically or rationally.

In 1915, Turkish forces attack Van and its Armenian inhabitants in eastern Turkey. Clarence Ussher is an American missionary doctor who witnesses and later writes about the destruction. Arshile Gorky is an artist who loses his family and escapes to America. Ani (Arsinée Khanjian) is a modern day professor, and an expert on Gorky and his painting of his mother. Edward Saroyan is directing a film about Van and hires Ani intending to incorporate Gorky into the story. Ani is facing trouble at home. Her son Raffi (David Alpay) is rebelling and sleeping with his step-sister Celia (Marie-Josée Croze). Celia blames Ani for the death of her father. Raffi decides to go to Turkey. When he returns, he's stopped at customs by David (Christopher Plummer). David has family problems of his own. In Saroyan's film, half-Muslim Ali (Elias Koteas) plays the cruel governor Jevdet Bey and Martin Harcourt (Bruce Greenwood) plays Ussher.

Tackling the Armenian Genocide is a tricky matter. Director Atom Egoyan does it by entangling with many issues of art, history and truth. It is a very commendable effort diving deeper than a simple reenactment which the character Saroyan does in the movie. I love every scene where these issues are touched on. I do wish Raffi is played by a more compelling actor. I love Croze but her character adds an unnecessary layer. Her character is struggling with her father's suicide. That emotional conflict is too similar to Raffi's father's death from attempting to assassinate the Turkish ambassador. Raffi and Celia could easily be combined into one character. I would actually keep Croze who is the better actor of the two. With such complex emotions, the cast of characters would be better off with some minor trimming. The same goes for David's family. The movie needs a little bit of emotional trimming.

In 1915, right in the midst of World War I when the eyes of the world were focused on other corners of the planet, the Turks slaughtered over a million of their own Armenian citizens in a holocaust that the Turks to this day deny ever happened. Atom Egoyan's complex, though not entirely successful film, `Ararat,' attempts to show just how long a shadow this horrific genocide still casts over the Armenian people today.

Rather than simply make a film set at the time of the genocide, Egoyan has chosen to set his film in the present and have his vast assortment of characters reflect on what this almost century-old event means to them in their present lives (most of them are second generation Armenians and Turks living in Canada). One of those characters is an aged film director who, in honor of his mother who endured the atrocities, has come to Canada to make a film about the event. Thus, all the glimpses we get of the actual genocide are film-within-a-film reenactments. In a bit of irony, Egoyan shows just how difficult it is for any work of art to faithfully capture the `truth' of such an event, for falsehoods inevitably creep into the picture the moment the artist alters even minor facts under the guise of `artistic license.' This is particularly ironic given the fact that `truth' and `facts' are such an important part of the case the Armenians have built against the Turks. The film deals head-on with what is `truth' and how much of history comes down to a matter of personal perception.

Egoyan has provided a veritable labyrinth of characters and events, so much so that it becomes almost impossible to provide anything near a comprehensive summary of either the plot or the people who are caught in its entanglements and complexities. Suffice it to say that the film deals with such weighty themes as the intricacies of mother/child relationships, coming to terms with the ghosts from both the private and collective past, and the part denial plays in assuaging our own sense of guilt and responsibility for unspeakable events in history. This denial then allows us to live our lives in unconcerned complacency.

Egoyan views his film almost as a giant canvas and he keeps throwing characters onto it, often without painting the strokes in clear enough detail for us to understand fully what is going on (an apt analogy, given the fact that one of the characters is an actual painter and he deliberately leaves part of his artwork unfinished). Some of the people we meet are fascinating and complex, while others seem underdeveloped and too enigmatic to make much of a contribution to our comprehension of the material. Occasionally, we get the nagging impression that a number of the minor characters and plot strands are left hanging in a state of unresolved limbo. Moreover, the film occasionally lapses into a pedantic tone, as if the writer felt it more important to provide us with a history lesson than involve us in a drama. What promises to be an enlightening character study frequently becomes a polemic.

Structurally, `Ararat' is very complex, with the director cutting back and forth between characters in the present, one character in the past, and the events of the genocide as depicted in the film being made. Egoyan deserves credit for bringing it all together even if the very artifice of the format ends up distancing the audience from the emotional immediacy of this very grim subject matter. `Ararat' is more of an intellectual exercise than an emotionally involving drama, but it does serve a salutary purpose in raising the public's consciousness about a shameful, tragic moment in history that has for too long gone unrecognized by the general public.

I'm not a great fan of Egoyan, but I did find Felicia's Journey fairly competent. This last attempt (Ararat) is a sacrilege, a clumsy blundering mess of a film and a huge disservice to the Armenian people. If I were Armenian, I think I'd be very offended.

I have hesitated to see this film for many reasons, some might be obvious but others might not. I watched it on Starz the other night. I had questioned whether to go ahead and view or instead watch "All or Nothing" by one of the cinema's most intriquing directors, Mike Leigh, on another cable network. But, for better or worse, I am glad I saw this film. For starters, I have always been an admirer of Atom Egoyan. I feel he was snubbed, and should have been a best director Oscar nominee for "The Sweet Hereafter" (1997). I think he is very brave for making this film for surely even within the Armenian community there are many political povs about this issue and about how they should feel about it. I will refrain from getting into the politics of the subject matter of "Ararat" and into my own personal view about this controversy which is very much riddled in red tape for reasons I understand all too painfully well. Sadly, the rest of the world probably never will. Except, I will say, that the problem is two-fold. One, there is the Armenian conflict that Turkey and Turkish people do not accept or have outright distorted their view of history. Second, there is the reality that Turkey and the Turkish culture is very much hated, despised and oppressed in the West for reasons that partially stem from this issue as well as many others. I challenge any of you to go to a Blockbuster, or any other video store and try to find a Turkish film. I am 99 percent you will not find one even though the list of outstanding Turkish film directors is one which includes the likes of Yilmaz Guney, the director of "Baba" (The Father) "Yol" -- who was admittedly censored considerably in Turkey until recently (he died in political exile in France some 20 years ago), Ali Ozgenturk who directed "At---The Horse" and Sinan Cetin who directed the outstanding, internationally praised political comedy "Propaganda." I could also mention Serif Goren, Zeki Okten and so many others. It is a simple truth that while the West criticizes Turkey for various infractions, including its' treatment of ethnic Kurds, yet it continously suppresses the Turkish culture and Turkish people itself.Having grown up in the USa, and being half-American, I can validfy that this is the way it is. It may not be intentional, but all of us know that it some form or fashion 'the n----rs of Europe" tag applied to Turkish-Europeans applies to all of us. Now having said this one might think, I am going to criticize Egoyan for making this film. But, he has every artistic right to make "Ararat" and everyone, including people in Turkey, have a right to view this film and make their own decisions about this film. I do not consider "Ararat" a hate film as some others like "Midnight Express" and arguably "America, America" are. However, I do think the character of Ali, played by Elias Koteas, who was great in "The Thin Red Line" is cookie-cutter stereotype of Turkish-Westerners. He seems like a deliberately crude person who says things like "let's just drop our 'expletive' history" and he seems like a person devoid of any intellectual curiosity. Even though I have nothing against homosexuals, I don't think it was appropriate to make this character homosexual either. By doing so, the character plays into a stereotype that Billy Hayes utilized in his book (perhaps novel would be a more accurate word) "Midnight Express." This is the notion that all Turks are 'secretly gay' and therefore they are 'violent towards women.' My statements may seem outright ridicilous but few of you have probably endured the subliminal hatred that each of us who live in the West know to be a true fact of life. The film in a film scenes of the film actually are not ones which bother me as much. There is clearly a dark history here and it somehow has to be approached diplomatically but until the abuse of the Turkish culture is also approached, I am afraid as it was once said in "Cool Hand Luke." --- we will always have a failure to communicate.