[VIFF 2019] REVIEW: An unwelcome 'Guest of Honour'

David Thewlis stars in Guest of Honour, directed by Atom Egoyan.

Go through Atom Egoyan’s filmography on Wikipedia and there’s some sort of award attached to every one of his feature films except one: Guest of Honour, which was chosen as the Opening Gala film at VIFF 2019. The Vancouver Island-raised Egoyan holds a special place in the hearts of British Columbians as one of Canada’s most prominent and accomplished filmmakers, but Guest of Honour falls well short on quality. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 3 and then at TIFF a week later, and failed to generate any sort of significant positive buzz. The VIFF crowd was generous, but Guest of Honour feels more like the kind you can’t wait to shoo rather than the one you wish would stay for dessert.

The film begins with Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira), a high-school music teacher who meets with Father Greg (Luke Wilson) to make funeral arrangements for her father, Jim (David Thewlis). He was a food inspector, and after the death of his wife had grown apart from Veronica. Through a multitude of uninteresting narrative devices, including the opening setup of Veronica and Greg as two very unreliable storytellers and the confusing decision to have flashbacks within flashbacks, we re-live the past through different perspectives. The story is needlessly convoluted, and even the best storytellers will struggle to sift through this mess, much less be able to emphasize what is or isn’t important.

(Spoilers ahead)

Jim and Veronica are introduced to Alicia (Sochi Fried), a music teacher and her son, Walter. After Jim’s wife becomes terminally ill, he begins an affair with Alicia, much to Veronica’s disapproval, though Veronica later begins a relationship with Walter in their adult years. Walter blames Veronica for the death of his mother (for reasons that aren’t very clear) and their relationship ends tragically.

Fast forward a few years, and Veronica is accused by the bus driver of their music tour, Mike (Rossif Sutherland), of having an inappropriate relationship with one of her students, Clive (Alexandre Bourgeois), who bears a passing resemblance to Walter. Though Mike’s accusations prove false, Veronica voluntarily goes to jail anyway because she feels guilty about how her relationship with Walter had ended (logic and legal process be damned). For the rest of the film, Jim tries to re-connect with Veronica and goes through great (and very immoral) lengths to do so. There’s also Veronica’s pet rabbit, which should serve as some sort of proxy for Jim and Veronica’s relationship, but between ruminations about fried rabbit ears and a rabbit’s foot keychain, it’s hard to tell what Egoyan’s trying to say.

Thewlis often plays the guy you really shouldn’t trust, and he’s not above abusing his power as Jim. Unfortunately, we just never learn exactly why he’s so adamant about repairing his relationship with Veronica, or why he constantly lies to her while trying to do so. De Oliveira’s performance is even more difficult to pin down, at times steely-eyed in her resolve and other times losing all sense of maturity, including her character’s key decision to torment Mike, perhaps the mostly poorly developed character of all – a messy hair and bushy beard dad bod meant to convey the most obvious variety of dial-a-creep. Clive is a borderline sociopath, but also one of the more charismatic characters in the film. Egoyan’s spouse, Arsinee Khanjian, is one of the few joys, providing comic relief as an Armenian restaurateur who becomes the victim of Jim’s transgressions.

The audience is forced to sit through this convoluted tale and half-baked ideas about loss and revenge, conveyed by a multitude of characters with baffling motivations. It’s difficult to encapsulate what each of the characters represent because they spin in all sorts of directions and their motivations seemingly change from scene to scene. It’s so puzzling that it’s difficult to say whether the characters are poorly written or the actors sorely miscast.

The end product is ludicrous and unbelievable and altogether unsatisfying. It’s a chore to sit through and you keep waiting for that one thing to tie it together, but it never really does.

Guest of Honour gets one and a half stars out of four.