Guest of Honour

I once wrote of ALL ABOUT STEVE, “I defy you to write a dumber screenplay.”  I never imagined that Egyptian-born, Armenian-Canadian Atom Egoyan would be the one to do it.  But here we are.  What should be a dark comedy about a fastidious food inspector is instead a tonally-ambivalent mess:  ALL ABOUT STEVE meets  DEKALOG—replace “deaf kids” with band nerds and “sinkhole” with a bus driver harboring anger management issues.

Jim (David Thewlis) is a food inspector.  With a stroke of his pen, he can break the livelihood of restaurateurs.  Convicted of a crime, his daughter, Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira), recounts a series of bizarre events as a vehicle for exploring the tenuous relationship with her father.   Planning her father’s funeral, Veronica explains to a priest (Luke Wilson, whose line readings aren’t the most stilted of the picture) that her father, “Makes a lot of odd choices.”

At first, Jim seems strait-laced, but a picture unfolds of a rule-bending, if subtly-bigoted inspector—haranguing minorities almost exclusively.  The cartoonishly-silly excitement of one Hispanic owner who passes betrays the film’s condescending attitude toward migrants of color.

We think we know what kind of movie this is, buttressed by the cliché whereby the lead actor watches old videos of his Life That Was—a wife who succumbed to cancer.  Complicating matters is the music teacher—the very idea of the glass harp as a serious instrument might elicit muffled laughter—whose affair with Jim doesn’t go unnoticed.

Closer to the cause of Veronica’s incarceration is the love triangle involving Walter (Gage Munroe) on the one hand, and Mike (Rossif Sutherland), the tour bus driver for the orchestra in which Walter and Veronica play.  Surprisingly, the director whose works include ARARAT peppers an incomprehensibly messy story with stereotypes of minorities and the poor—every negligent restaurateur happens to be an immigrant, and every sketchy figure a working stiff.

Even the lithe, pretty daughter whose mother was Brazilian (read: exotic, silent, and inexplicably married to someone who looks like Thewlis) repeatedly asserts with the detached indifference of a trust fund baby that she deserves prison time.  I don’t buy it, though it’s unhelpful that De Oliveira commits zero effort to selling it.

A poor man’s Alan Rickman, Thewlis sells a character we’d love to see in the wholly-committed, absurdist caper GUEST OF HONOUR yearns to be.  Here he’s left navigating a minefield of poor screenwriting choices.  I’d phone it in, too, if I were stuck in a film in which the pretty boyfriend (Munroe) suggests of the obsessive-possessive bus driver who kept haranguing Veronica for a date, “No, don’t report him.  Who’s gonna drive the bus after?”