Item #: 1456DVD Category: CRIME Format: DVD MPAA Rating: PG13

Woolly Rating: 5/10 (95 votes)

MEMBER COMMENTS ON THIS VIDEO

jd	Oct 25, 2001 @ 12:44:19

<[:-} very good movie that meets the w&w criteria
the beautiful, very talented, relatively unknown elaine cassidy turns in a deeply affecting, heart wrenchingly sympathetic and performance. the amazingly versatile, always great bob hoskins masterfully supplies the psychotronia by the boat load. dir. atom egoyan somehow molds it all into a truly good movie that also feeds the exploitation jones.

90 Percent Good
That Atom Egoyan is one of today's major film artists is close to universally conceded. As for the films themselves, I'm 50-50. With "Exotica" I felt the material pulled a dirty trick ("ha ha you pervs, you thought the movie was about one thing but was entirely about something else; Don't you feel like scum?"). It was sort of a stunt, like Michael Haneke's bogus exercise in cruelty and control in "Funny Games." With "The Sweet Hereafter" there was a definite improvement, yet I merely admired that morose exam of human motivations more than I liked it. His earlier "Calendar," was something altogether different; a revelation I thought--an instance where rigid structure and careful control of symbols actually worked. A very clever, moving and haunting movie about time, communication and human relations. With "Felicia's Journey" Egoyan directed his most conventional movie to date, and yet for that it's quite different from most films. 90 percent into it, I was engrossed by its slow, python coil as the Bob Hoskin's character Hilditch deliberately, patiently plotted yet another perfect crime--pulling the wool over the eyes of one more naive innocent. Parts of this movie reminded me a little of the cult classic from 1965, "The Collector" in which Terence Stamp added a kidnapped young woman to his collection of butterflies. But Hoskin's loner Hilditch in "Felicia's Journey" plays a far more elaborate game, making his victims think they are free, even as he exerts a magnetic pull on them of which they are not aware. He carefully convinces them that he's nothing but a completely innocuous, harmless, vulnerable old chap with a dying wife. Felicia's own story is more conventional: she's a young gal who fell for the oldest line in the book and now she's pregnant and outcast from the family. Worse, she's carrying "the enemy within her," a baby conceived of a lad with British sympathies--anathema to Felicia's Irish nationalist father. Both these characters are damaged, but Felicia has a chance for redemption, a shot at moving on and learning. Hilditch is too far gone for that. A master chef, he is completely and hopelessly alone, left in a permanent state of childhood in a museum-like house, damaged by the suffocating attention and humiliating public exposure forced upon him as the son of Gala, a sort of Frenchy Martha Stewart/Kathy Lee with a TV cooking show in which young Hilditch was forced to appear against his will. He revisits these shows via VCR, obsessing over the only love (and curse) of his life, his mom. Still, Hilditch has morphed into a sort of father figure, something he never had but desperately wanted, but a very odd and perverse father figure. His uncanny knack for spotting girls who just got off the boat, who are in trouble, allows him to act the father role, helping them change their lives and outlooks; giving them something he never had. But then (SPOILER HERE--), having molded a perfect thing (like his perfect, exquisite food creations) he must devour them or lay them to rest. Hilditch wants to give to these girls the care he never really got. His desire to destroy his creations is obviously the product of a suicidal mind. Hilditch himself is like the walking dead. Felicia becomes the instrument by which Hilditch will cast off his demons, find a resolution and move toward his obvious fate. (--SPOILER OVER) I don't know anything about the original novel on which this film is based, so I don't know if the plethora of TVs and TV cameras by which Hilditch vicariously lives his past shames and triumphs were in the original novel (which Egoyan would have liked) or if they're Egoyan's own additions to the script. As in most of his films, Egoyan's characters are perverted by TV, losing something of themselves in their TV-saturated culture. Egoyan himself engages in this interesting obsession, always casting his own wife Arsinée Khanjian (here almost unrecogizable as Hilditch's mother Gala) in his films. Images reflecting reality. As usual, there are lots of interesting things to ponder in an Egoyan film, even though "Felicia's Journey" is basically a standard thriller. Along the way, Egoyan provides splending visuals of the landscape, his usual liquid slowly-roving lateral camera movements to provide a sense of unease, and fascinatingly deliberate conversations that allow you to study the faces of the characters--looking for clues about their inner torments (and how they hide them). But in the last 15 minutes of "Felicia's Journey," Egoyan wants to have his cake and eat it too. Hilditch will be moved toward his death wish, but the "accidental" way that this happens--via the rantings of a thoroughly obnoxious Jamaican Jehovah's Witness woman--seems arbitrary and unconvincing. Developments like this DO happen in real life, but more often they happen in movies. Despite this finale, "Felicia's Journey" is a worthwhile one to take, although as always, Egoyan's films are decidedly not for all tastes. *** FELICIA'S JOURNEY c. 2002 Kevin Rayburn earthgroove1@yahoo.com

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