Posted: 01/05/2000

Felicia’s Journey

(1999)

by Doug White

Director Atom Egoyan’s loving adaptation of William Trevor’s 1994 novel about a pregnant seventeen year-old and the lonely, middle-aged caterer she befriends and his dark secret.

As a stilted voice croons from an old phonograph record, Felicia’s Journey welcomes us with a stately tour of the large, nostalgically-decorated and warmly-lit house where much of its action takes place. The cliché that a house reflects the mind of its inhabitant is not immediately revealing in this case.

This house is the life-long residence of Mr. Hilditch, a caterer at a local steel mill. Hauntingly played by Bob Hoskins (Mona Lisa, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?), Hilditch is a dapper, unctuously gentle chap. His eccentric care for others inspires special respect and affection among his staff and the workers whom his culinary creations nourish.

Nightly, at home, Hilditch prepares lavish meals for himself under the amusing tutelage of TV gourmet Gala (Arsinee Khanjian, never more delightful), whose signature kitchen appliances Hilditch possesses, closeted and unboxed, by the dozen.

A creepier side of Hilditch’s infatuation and eccentric behavior comes into view through his encounters with Felicia (Elaine Cassidy), a naïve and pregnant Irish girl who crosses the channel from northern Ireland in search of her unborn baby’s father. Like a fairytale innocent, Felicia arrives in Birmingham without any identification, carrying a small backpack and knowing only that her Johnny works in a (non-existent, we learn) lawnmower factory.

Wandering lost through an industrial landscape, Felicia meets Hilditch at the entrance to the mill. He gives her precise directions that seem to lead her right back to him; which is probably not coincidental, considering what we learn about his intent.

Through his rearview mirror and hidden video camera, Hilditch quickly sizes up Felicia as a girl with a special need. Meeting her seems to compel Hilditch to review his secret videotapes of similar girls he has befriended and may have murdered in a way that would make Edgar Allan Poe shudder.

The film’s pivotal character is the evangelical Miss Calligary (Claire Benedict). Aggressively sharing her rapture door to door, Miss Calligary meets Felicia and Hilditch at the moment when each is most vulnerable; and her words transform both characters in unexpected ways.

The film is most affecting in poetic asides, in which Peter Sarossy’s photography and Mychael Dann’s score noticeably complement one another, effectively highlighting themore lyrical stirrings in the characters. We see Hilditch spoon-feed a steelworker from a small covered bowl while enormous industrial machinery pounds and hisses around them. Through a bedroom window, as her invalid grandmother lies muttering in Gaelic, we see Felicia begin her journey, walking into the distance past neighbor boys playing soccer.

At large, Atom Egoyan examines his characters for clues to those passions that grow in mourning gone awry. In other films (Family Viewing, The Adjustor, Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter), Egoyan’s circumspect storytelling enhances drama, sometimes to operatic proportions. In this case, though, the story unfolds without a strong or consistent dramatic sail, making it difficult for all but committed admirers to avoid being bewildered or simply bored.

If you recall the inspired transcendence of The Sweet Hereafter, you may be patient enough to mull over the psychoanalytic puzzle of Hilditch’s personality as each piece is revealed in enigmatic flashbacks of his childhood. However, even for long-time admirers, Felicia’s behavior is an impossible chore to sort out. We see (again, in flashbacks) poignant slices of her life in Ireland: seduced and manipulated by Johnny (Peter McDonald); sternly warned and threatened by her father (Gerard McSorley), a hardened IRA supporter; insulted and snubbed by Johnny’s embittered mother (Brid Brennan). Throughout, Felicia’s face exhibits a fog of sincere uncertainty. We can only bear witness to a hopeless mix of gullibility, desperation, and self-delusion that is involved in her decision to make her journey.

In the end, Felicia is shown as having found a place of grace in service to the dead. In dramatic terms, however, since her confusion passes so abruptly into a new sense of purpose, her spiritual awakening seems enigmatic at best, leaving us to wonder if all perhaps is still unwell.

Doug White e-mailed this, his first review for Film Monthly, to us with great trust, and we are very glad he did.

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