Review of The Adjuster by Atom Egoyan, 1991
The adjuster is an insurance adjuster. You have insured yourself, which means you’re safe, and the adjuster makes sure you’re safe. If your house burns down, he will make sure you get your life back. And this guy is the best in the business. He will do anything for you. And yeah, that includes sexy time.
But what is a life, anyway? Biologists study life, but what is a life? We have to know what something is to restore it. And this adjuster doesn’t know either. His attempts at restoration ultimately seem rather desperate. Maybe that’s why he can’t have a life of his own. Maybe that’s why he won’t take the time to understand his wife or what she does for a living. Maybe that’s why his wife’s sister lives with them, not speaking English, burning family photographs. And maybe that’s why he lives in a model home and not a real home. He has a fantasy about what a life is, and that’s all he knows. He shoots toy arrows into his empty lot of dirt, like a dark, empty parody of Cupid.
Fire is a constant presence in this movie. The pattern suggests that everything vital is fated to burn. The main character would not have a job without fire. His wife, by the way, is a censor. They live in a world where nothing explicit or disturbing is allowed to be seen, suggesting that the main character’s desperate inability to know what a life really entails is shared by the rest of the world.
And then finally we have Fellini. Okay, he’s not really Fellini, but I think of him as a movie director and he even pretends to be one. He is one of the best bad guys in cinema, and the actor does a damn good job of being unsympathetic. He and his wife are wealthy, but their life has become stale, so they enact fantasies. But they never seem good enough. I think Fellini can sense the shallowness of it all, but he is completely helpless as to how he can fix it. This helplessness combined with power make him dangerous. He often enters a scene like a force of nature. Not noisily but ominously.
The movie is what I call an untethered allegory. In other words, the adjuster represents X, his wife represents Y, the sister represents Z, Fellini represents dammit I ran out of letters but you get the idea. Different people can come up with different allegories. My favorite example of an untethered allegory is the Wizard of Oz. You can find many wildly varying interpretations of this movie.
Often untethered allegories get an unfair shake. They are accused of not having “character development” or simply not having realistic characters acting realistically. But this is because the characters are not complete human beings with psychologies. The importance, the complexity, comes in the relationships between the characters. For example, there is something very important about the way the adjuster doesn’t listen to his wife even though he so minutely and obsessively tries to get every piece of information out of his clients. For example, there is something very important about the way the sister, who is the only tie to the wife’s original family, burns every family photo she receives. The importance is not in what it reveals about the characters! The importance is in the contrast of listening and not listening, and what that says about listening itself. The importance is in the burning, and what that says about memory and attachment. And then, for another level, what about the relationship between the not-listening and the burning? This is how allegories create richness, by mapping out a field of symbols and creating a sizzling network of possibilities between and among them.
There are times in this movie when one wonders if the sister even exists. There are times in this movie when one wonders if the wife is dreaming the entire movie. I won’t spoil the ending for you, but it is impossible, and yet I didn’t find it jarring. It fit perfectly. It’s kind of like Dorothy waking up in her black and white bed but instead of Auntie Em it’s Sally Bowles telling her that things are getting real iffy in Europe and she should probably go back to sleep.