Mark Reviews Movies: GUEST OF HONOUR

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 9, 2020

Writer/director Atom Egoyan's Guest of Honour winds and weaves a tale of guilt and jealousy over decades and across a generation. The filmmaker's style is so down-to-earth, especially as conveyed by the performances, that we might even think there is something deeper to this story than its multiple, unexpected revelations.

At a certain point, though, the movie's veil of sincerity becomes transparent. We can see right through to the screenplay's machinations and observe nothing else. That moment, by the way, occurs somewhere between the discovery that a child allowed a woman to die in a horrible fire and one character's use of rabbit feces as an extortion tool. The movie's sincerity is a façade, and since Egoyan implements it in an attempt to cover up some quite melodramatic and rather silly plot details and contrivances, it eventually starts to look quite phony, too.

For a while, though, Egoyan's intricate narrative structure is quite appetizing. It begins with Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira), whose father recently died. She's arranging the funeral with Fr. Greg (Luke Wilson), the pastor of a local church, when she starts talking about her old man.

He was Jim (David Thewlis), a health inspector for the government, who lost his wife, Veronica's mother, to cancer and a restaurant to the financial necessities of raising a daughter on his own. Jim let go of his dreams and took a steady job.

To explain much more almost seems unfair. Part of the movie's early engagement is discovering how many layers there are to this two-part story—one about the father, as he goes about his daily routine with the sullen weight of loss and disappointment, and the other about the daughter, as she gradually reveals her own unfortunate history. What we learn—perhaps for the purposes of holding back some of the specific details—early enough is that Veronica was in prison for a crime to which she confessed, although didn't commit by all accounts and plenty of evidence.

When Veronica finally reveals that information to the priest (It's something the movie itself already has established), we definitely realize that Egoyan's plotting has wrapped itself around into an absurd knot. One's focus might be drawn toward the poor priest, who unintentionally—and, on an unintentional level, amusingly—ends up getting involved in much more than he bargained for with something that should be straightforward. It only gets worse for Veronica's captive audience, who handles it with infinite patience—and is conveniently in possession of at least one revelation of his own.

The alleged crime for the former high school band teacher was a scandal, involving two underage students of hers. The truth of the case, though, involved a jealous bus driver (played by Rossif Sutherland), who couldn't stand how much attention the teenage boys paid Veronica and how little he mattered to her.

Egoyan's approach seems grounded in these characters, and there's such a consistent concentration on ideas of guilt and jealousy that we think he's leading us down some path of more than just plot surprises. There are plenty, involving the details of the alleged crime, how some saw something mischievous but relatively innocent as a crime in the first place, the daughter's suspicions about her father's fidelity to her mother, and an old boyfriend of Veronica's, whose end is connected to another death.

All of these conveniences and contrivances are present from the start of the story, but they don't seem to matter too much. A significant reason is the conviction of these performances.

De Oliveira is so convincing that one might only notice a considerable inconsistency in Veronica's character in retrospect (Even though her driving force is meant to be a double blast of guilt, there's a lengthy period during the flashbacks in which she seems to have forgotten it, and the motive for trying to get back at the bus driver doesn't quite line up in the way the character explains it). Meanwhile, Thewlis is in full command of an internalized performance, founded upon grief and lost dreams and an underlying anger at how things have turned out for him and his family.

As far as distractions from an overcooked piece of melodrama go, Egoyan's approach here is a pretty good one—for a while, at least. Matters, though, become more convoluted. The complications pile one atop another atop another, and the actual specifics of this story start to come across as, well, silly (The fate of a pet rabbit—and, in particular, its feet—is meant to be the last straw for a character, but it plays like a ridiculous attempt at on-the-nose symbolism). There are significant gaps, such as the development of a police investigation into Thewlis (arising from an event to which the title alludes) and any kind of actual resolution to Veronica's tale of wrongful but willing imprisonment.

One almost admires Egoyan for fooling us as long as he does with this material. Indeed, Guest of Honour proves that a great filmmaker can make almost any story work, but too much is still too much.

Note: Guest of Honour is available on distributor Kino Lorber's virtual theatrical program Kino Marquee. You can rent the film for home viewing, with part of the cost being shared with your local independent theaters (e.g., the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago). For more information and to purchase access to the film, click here. Participating theaters are listed on the page.

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