December 6, 1999
Web posted at: 3:05 p.m. EST (2005 GMT)

By Reviewer Paul Tatara

(CNN) -- Canadian director Atom Egoyan has been cranking out challenging-though-erratic films since the early 1980s. His best work so far, 1997's "The Sweet Hereafter," is perhaps the most powerful, emotionally complex picture of the past 10 years. There's a horrible grace to its disheartening storyline, and Egoyan wrings the performance of a lifetime out of accomplished British actor Ian Holm. If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favor and rent this powerhouse film on video.

Egoyan knows how to handle performers, and his movies always feature evocative production design. But he frequently reaches for thematic profundity that's not apparent in his material. "Exotica" (1994), for instance, spins several stories around the workings of a swanky strip club. The results are like a slow-moving tone poem that makes sense only to its author. It's interesting while not being all that good, and incredibly un-erotic given its scenes of young women seductively disrobing in front of lecherous men. Egoyan's tendency toward glacial pacing implies "importance" while robbing the film of badly needed sexual energy.

His latest movie, "Felicia's Journey" (based on William Trevor's apparently unfilmable novel), is a major disappointment. "The Sweet Hereafter" displayed a long-awaited cohesiveness in Egoyan's work that's once again missing in action.

Bob Hoskins stars as Joseph Hilditch, the finicky proprietor of a cafeteria who treats everyone with overweening tenderness but doesn't have any real friends. Joseph's gentle voice and tidy, philosophical insights suggest a cloistered priest who's afraid to fully engage with other human beings. And his obsessively organized little home looks like it fell out of a 40-year-old issue of Good Housekeeping magazine.

We come to find that Joseph might be sheltered, but he does deal with other people. It's just that they're usually troubled young women, and he usually ends up killing them.

If you're rolling your eyes and thinking "Oh, boy, another serial killer," you're absolutely right. There's not a more over-examined individual in world cinema than the apparently benign mass murderer, but Hoskins does what he can to give Joseph unexpected shadings.

Strangely, though, he's so withdrawn he begins to seem like a cartoon character. Strategically bulging eyes and popping veins are the keys to Joseph's inner workings. He constantly looks like an ornate teapot that's on the verge of boiling over.

The first part of the film crosscuts between Joseph and an Irish teen named Felicia (Elaine Cassidy) who's been kicked out of her house by her father for becoming pregnant by her boyfriend. Felicia travels to England, where she hopes to track down the boyfriend and raise the child. He's nowhere to be found, however, having joined the Army. So Felicia is stuck wandering around a town that she doesn't know, with only a handful of money and not much in the way of smarts.

She's just innocent enough to be taken in by Joseph, who treats her as his own child while we wait for him to hack her to pieces and bury her in the backyard by the poinsettias.

There's not a single act of violence in the film, and the tone is hardly intimidating. It's the first quaint movie ever made about killing runaways. You can almost imagine Joseph holding up his pinky while he stabs Felicia and lays her out on a doily.

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The movie is so thin it would disappear if it turned sideways. There's a tiresome attempt to imply a twisted relationship between Joseph and his dead mother (Egoyan's wife, Arsinee Khanjian). Mom was a popular cooking-show hostess, and Joseph spends a lot of time watching her on videotape as he prepares the scrumptious meals that she's whipping up for her viewers. He also has about 50 mixers stacked up in the closet with her beaming face on the front of the box.

We sometimes see Joseph in the old videos, and he sure looks like a miserable little kid. But Mom is more of a kook than a demon. The most disturbing thing about her is Khanjian's go-for-broke French accent. She sounds like the obnoxious castle guard in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (1975).

The Oedipal thing eventually turns into a debate on the merits of aborting an unwanted baby. Egoyan, however, never sticks with an individual concept long enough to make a coherent point. You have to give him credit for only implying evil rather than shoving it down our throats like most directors would. But he's so systematic about it, he ends up implying an entire movie. Bold attempt or not, it's a stretch to call it a thriller.

There's a sprinkling of bad language in "Felicia's Journey," but your grandmother would probably think it needs to be juiced up. We're supposed to find horror in the fact that young Joseph is forced to eat liver. Rated R. 116 minutes.