[In the following review, Taubin explores the recurring themes common in The Adjuster and Egoyan's earlier films.]

The protagonist of The Adjuster, Atom Egoyan's discomforting fourth feature, is named Noah Render. “The allusions are so obvious, they're hysterical,” says Egoyan during an interview. “What satisfaction could there be in analysing such a name?,” he scoffs. “So what if you realise that the motel where Noah boards his clients is like his ark?” Without pausing for breath, he does an about face and gleefully runs through dictionary definitions of the word ‘render’: “to represent, to break down into simple forms … What I like about ‘render’ is that it has so many contrary meanings.”

Or, as he remarked on another occasion: “If I have a set of concerns and a set of conflicting attitudes, then I have a film. I don't subscribe to a Messianic view of film-making and I don't disguise the fact that I haven't reached a conclusion. I encourage the audience to be aware that I am photographing people and to be deeply suspicious of my reasons for doing so.”

With its wide-screen format, velvety lighting, and speaker-taxing, low-frequency musical effects, The Adjuster (1991) is more sumptuous than Egoyan's earlier features. Next of Kin (1984), Family Viewing (1987) and Speaking Parts (1989). Nevertheless, all four films probe the same dilemma—the relationship between so-called family values and a sexual desire which is defined as either incestuous or promiscuous (in other words, as guilty). Always reflexive, the films are littered with references to home movies and pornography; often they're one and the same. Egoyan is as attracted to hardcore as his fellow-Canadian David Cronenberg is to horror. But unlike Cronenberg's films, which pay off in genre terms, Egoyan's evade the ‘money shot.’ Here, it's the scene of pornography, rather than the mechanics of the body, that's delivered.

Like their director/writer, whose characteristic nervous gesture is to wrap the five fingers of his right hand around the middle fingers of his left and hang on for dear life, Egoyan's films fling their Oedipal castration anxiety in our faces. It's what makes this otherwise chilly work both touching and terrifying.

“On New Year's Eve, 1989, my parents' house was devastated by a fire,” Egoyan explains. “We worked with an insurance adjuster and I was struck by the power he had over the rematerialisation of our lives. He had to assign value to objects and decide what our standard of living was. He was very professional, an ordinary guy, but I began to think what if he was going through a bad period and he didn't know how to evaluate his own life. The Adjuster came out of that experience.”

The Adjuster's Noah Render (Elias Koteas) is a compassion junkie; he wants to be indispensable to his clients. He arranges temporary motel housing, pays them daily visits, coaxes lists of lost objects from them, pours over family photographs in search of evidence to support a claim. “Is that a purebred?,” Noah gently enquires of a gay couple who've just shown him a picture of themselves with their dog. They look at him with disgust, but he's not deterred. “What did you pay for it? ＄500? What was the approximate value?”

Later one of the men seductively offers Noah a set of porn photographs taken in his former apartment. “You can't see much of the background,” comments Noah perplexedly. Then he has sex with the man, as if, by recreating the images in the photograph, he will be able to assign them a value. Noah is also sexually involved with two women clients. He offers his body to alleviate their anxiety and boredom. “You're in a state of shock,” he tells each of them, although his monotone voice, robotic gestures and guilt-stricken face suggest that he's really talking about himself.

Noah's domestic life revolves around Hera (Arsinée Khanjian), a film censor who lives with her sister and son in a model home in an otherwise abandoned housing tract. The film encourages us to assume that Noah and Hera are a couple. Noah is frequently in Hera's bedroom, but never in her bed. She treats him with a familiar contempt bordering on hatred. Hera knows that Noah's solicitousness is both paternalistic and narcissistic; nevertheless, she remains passively under his protection.

At work, Hera functions as errant daughter to the head of the censorship board (played by David Hemblen, the beefy-faced pater familias of Speaking Parts and Family Viewing). We never see the porn films the censors are rating, but we hear their moaning and groaning soundtracks. Hera's face remains inscrutable as cries of “do-me-Daddy” fill the auditorium. Secretly, she's been videotaping the juiciest bits to show to her sister. A recent émigrée from Armenia who speaks no English, the sister becomes addicted to the tapes. They're her primer in the language and customs of North America.

Noah and Hera function as mediators, classifying and assigning value to objects. Unlike Noah, Hera is aware of her alienation. Copying the films is a subversive act; as punishment, the head censor's assistant traps Hera in the screening room, and while his boss watches from the projection booth, he tries to rape her.

The Adjuster's third ‘family’ unit is a rich couple—Bubba (Maury Chaykin) and Mimi (Gabrielle Rose). “They have the means to have everything they want, but they don't know what they need, so they try different things,” Bubba explains to Noah, describing himself and his wife in the third person as if they were characters in the ‘home movie’ he plans to make using Hera and Noah's model home as the principal location. Among the “things” Bubba and Mimi have tried is a performance in which an entire football team lines up in an empty stadium to watch Mimi cheerlead to the rhythms of ‘High School Confidential.’ As the team captain prepares to reward Mimi for her efforts, Bubba turns his back on the scene and stares straight into the camera, protecting his wife from our gaze and reminding us of our complicity with his voyeurism.

Bubba's invasion and recreation of other people's lives is a more perverse version of what Noah does. Noah acquiesces to Bubba's desires—he rents the model house to him and moves Hera and the rest of the family to the motel where he keeps his other clients. Bubba's home movie climaxes with him burning down the house. As Talking Heads puts it, “He fights fire with fire.” Noah catches Bubba spreading gasoline on the floor. “You've come in just when the person in the film who's supposed to live here decides it's time to stop playing house. So are you in or are you out?,” Bubba bellows, shoving his face into Noah's. Noah flees and the house goes up in flames with Bubba and Mimi inside.

By destroying Noah's sham domesticity, Bubba proves that he is the real adjuster. The flashback which closes the film confirms what should have been obvious all along. Noah is not a man who leads a double life, cheating on his wife with his clients. Noah has no wife. Hera is just another client who was burned out of her house and whose claim was never settled. Noah hasn't lost his home because he never had one.

Although Noah is the only leading character not directly involved in film-making, he's the one who acts most like a director. Rushing from motel room to motel room, and from location to location, he desperately tries to keep everything under control. Named after a biblical patriarch, his position is that of a son struggling against his father's power. He resents the authority of the insurance company, which uses him “to clean up their messes,” and allows the rapacious Bubba to rewrite his life.

Egoyan edits the film to Noah's rhythms, breaking the operatic flow of the narrative by compulsively shifting the scene just when the action starts to heat up. The editing not only represses the erotic fantasies the film threatens to unleash, it also heightens our awareness of our own voyeurism by refusing to allow us to see. Add to this the interlocking power struggles in which the only allowable positions are parent or child, and the entire film takes on the repulsive allure of the primal scene.

The Adjuster is an elaboration of the material Egoyan laid out more brutally in Family Viewing. Relentlessly claustrophobic, Family Viewing is about the Oedipal struggle between Stan, a video equipment salesman, and his son Van. Having driven his wife (Van's mother) away and placed her mother (Van's grandmother) in a nursing home, Stan is dedicatedly taping over treasured home video recordings—replacing idyllic images of young Van and his mother romping in the grass with clinically depicted sexual encounters between himself and his live-in girlfriend, who not-so-secretly also has the hots for Van. With the help of a young woman who works in a telephone sex establishment (where Stan is one of her clients), Van manages to rescue the tapes from Stan's clutches, his grandmother from the nursing home, and his mother from a homeless shelter. Van establishes a new household with the three women, and Stan, who's been frantically pursing them, is wiped out by a heart attack.

Family Viewing is remarkable for its use of video technology. Stan's bedroom diary and Van's baby pictures were actually recorded on consumer VHS; the living-room scenes involving Stan, Van and the girlfriend were produced sitcom-style, using three studio television cameras. Surveillance camera footage and broadcast images were frequently intercut with the action. Transferred for theatrical release to 16mm, the image has a degenerated look which functions both expressively and metaphorically in relation to the narrative.

Egoyan followed Family Viewing with Speaking Parts. In terms of its technology, the film is set about five years in the future. In one of the more memorable scenes, two characters engage in mutual masturbation via videophone. In another, a sister discovers something she never knew about her beloved dead brother by watching a home movie in a video mausoleum. Roughly described, Speaking Parts is about the making of a movie about organ transplants which takes the form of a television talk show. “If Family Viewing is about the absence of familial love,” says Egoyan, “then Speaking Parts is about the withholding of romantic love.” (And The Adjuster is about the confusion of the two.)

All relationships in both Family Viewing and Speaking Parts are mediated and transformed by video technology. The home video apparatus is a sex toy which fuels forbidden fantasies. It's the object of a tug of war between the sons or daughters who need it to preserve childhood memories (incestuous yearnings) and the bad fathers who employ it to extend their power, rewriting personal history in the process.

Excepting Godard and Cronenberg, no other film-maker has explored the connection between technology and voyeurism and between home movies and pornography so intensely or intelligently. “It's the difficulty of representing the self in a society completely obsessed with representation that interests me.” But if that's the problem Egoyan is addressing, then the 35mm wide-screen format of The Adjuster seems a bit of a dinosaur—cumbersome, irrelevant and outdated. Especially since Egoyan isn't using it to make ‘gloss’ Hollywood films.

If The Adjuster leaves Noah no choice but to start his life from scratch, Egoyan is in a similar position with regard to his film-making career. While The Adjuster has done well on the festival circuit, it's too unnerving a film to attract a large art house audience. And Egoyan openly admits that he doesn't want to be trapped into making more and more expensive films in order to placate audiences with mainstream production values. On the other hand, his relative fame makes him an unlikely candidate for arts council funding. Given the institutional constraints of film financing, it won't be easy for Egoyan to go back to using low-end technology. But nothing else will do.