The Adjuster

The Adjuster

The Adjuster is another one of those movies that you back into. It starts with people doing things you don’t understand and then gradually you find out what they’re doing, and why. Then everything makes sense except the characters, who have strange secrets and unknowable motives even though they live in the most normal of jobs.

Noah is an insurance adjuster, which means he comes into people’s lives after they’ve been struck by terrible tragedies, and tries to figure out what really happened, and how it can be fixed. Hera is his wife, a sweet-faced almost angelic woman whose job as a film censor requires her to sit alone hour after hour in a darkened room watching hard core pornographic images. They live in a house that is the only occupied residence in a suburban development that went broke; around them are billboards showing the other houses that may someday be built.

Both are evaluators Noah of fire damage, Hera of film content but both abuse their positions. Noah (Elias Koteas) moves his homeless clients into a motel and plays too active a role in their lives. Hera (Arsinee Khanjian) secretly tapes the films she views at work so she can show them to her sister, because they shared everything when they were girls. Now their lives are invaded by a wealthy couple who “adjust” others in more sinister ways.

Bubba (Maury Chaykin) and Mimi (Gabrielle Rose) have an unusual marriage based on his voyeurism, her exhibitionism and their great wealth; it’s nothing for him to hire a football team so that his wife can prance before them enacting cheerleader fantasies. When they stumble upon the adjuster and his wife, they realize they’ve hit pay dirt; the isolated house is perfect for one of their more elaborate scenarios.

“The Adjuster” was directed by Atom Egoyan, a Canadian who finds the strange comedy in ordinary things. “I wanted to make a film,” he writes in his notes, “about believable people doing believable things in an unbelievable way.” Often this involves the way Egoyan photographs them. A shot of Noah with a bow and arrow, for example, seems inexplicable until the camera explains.

The first appearance of Bubba is an optical illusion.

Throughout the movie, the characters seem about to be blotted up by their backgrounds – to disappear back into the billboards and advertising symbols that surround them.

What’s interesting is how Egoyan creates this intensely personal universe while at the same time making a movie that’s funny and challenging. He isn’t one of those directors who enjoys confusion and frustration; when he shows us something we can’t understand, and then pulls back to explain it, he takes as much delight in his revelation as a magician or Buster Keaton would.

That’s why the movie is consistently entertaining. Instead of just sitting there while the plot unfolds one, two, three, so that we can see that each event does indeed follow the last he keeps us watching and guessing as the jigsaw of his story and relationships finally forms a complete picture.

If I had never met Atom Egoyan, my guess is that he is someone who loves puzzles and paradoxes; someone who looks at the world askew with a dry wit; someone who finds it hilarious that everything we assume to be true could be a lie. He would likely excel at card tricks, but only if the deck had more than 52 cards in it.

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