Movie Review: 'Guest of Honour' Starring David Thewlis

Director Atom Egoyan is known for pain and deep emotional trauma. I once watched a friend of mine descend into a despair so deep while watching Egoyan’s The Captive that I strongly considered hiding the cutlery. Egoyan lingers on trauma, meditates upon it and explores it in the same way Civil War doctors probed wounds searching for unseen shrapnel. Egoyan digs in with his fingers and offers only a minor sedative via his deliberate storytelling.

For his latest feature, Guest of Honour, Egoyan is perhaps searching a little too much for points of despair. In the story of David Thewlis as a sadsack food inspector, Egoyan has found a convoluted tale of a father and daughter at odds over a misunderstanding unresolved by death. I will leave it a mystery as to who dies and how, but if you’re familiar with Egoyan, you knew someone, perhaps more than one someone, was going to die and the wound would not be viscous but rather empathic.

Jim (David Thewlis) is just the kind of guy who slips around the world performing an unassuming job in an unassuming manner. He’s not some flashy, pushy type, eager to deploy what little power he wields in the world. Rather, he’s a straight-laced professional just going about his duty, pointing out flaws to be corrected and acting in the public interest. His job is dull and not particularly fulfilling but he does it and is serious about his work.

It doesn’t take great insight to determine that Jim is carrying a great deal of weary resignation. He’s sad, clearly, but he’s not someone who goes on about it. Jim is living through the frustrating machinations of his daughter Victoria (Laysia De Oliveira), who is now in prison and has no interest in getting out. Through the course of this unusual mystery, we will come to find out that Victoria has manipulated her way into jail for a crime she did not commit.

Why? Well, that’s the mystery that Jim is painstakingly uncovering as the story proceeds. Jim visits Victoria in jail and pushes and prods her about possibly getting an early release and she shoots it down out of hand. Victoria is right where she wants to be and she doesn’t care to share why that is. Jim, on the other hand, is consumed by his daughter’s secret and the shame and embarrassment he feels regarding how people see her for what they believe she did.

Victoria is actually the person telling this story. We meet Victoria as she is at a church meeting with a priest, played by Luke Wilson, and making funeral arrangements. No spoilers on whose death, I already told you, it’s Egoyan, there’s more than one tragically dead soul here. Victoria is slowly unfurling the tale of how she came to be incarcerated parallel to the story of her father’s life, a complex mystery of dreary monotony that he desperately tries to spin into being a fulfilling life when he tells Victoria about his day at work during their visits.

As much as I find Atom Egoyan fascinating as a storyteller and stylist, I can’t help but say that Guest of Honour is more than a bit convoluted. The numerous complicated twists and turns that Egoyan lays on thick and via his deliberate, borderline glacial, storytelling pace, are downright laughable in how overwrought and downright silly they are. Victoria decided she wanted to go to jail for something she did as a kid and something to do with a former boyfriend.

However, how she gets to jail is a whole other story involving misconceptions, innuendo and her deliberate choice to make this byzantine plot her road to salvation. She’s punished herself emotionally for several decades and now it is time for the state to punish her whether they want to or not. As Victoria sees it, if she has to invent a ludicrously complicated, easily resolved lie and turn it into a crime, so be it. Unfortunately, the ludicrousness of the plot overwhelms what makes Victoria interesting and compelling.

I can relate to a character who bitterly wants a parent to feel agony of a kind few can imagine but Victoria’s plot here, it’s a bit much. Writer-Director Egoyan is stretched just a tad bit too thin in Guest of Honour. Egoyan is reaching so hard to make this farcical, biblical, cleansing penance of a plot work. I couldn’t help but chuckle a few times at the absurd lengths Victoria goes to get herself arrested. She couldn’t have thought of a less complicated route to a life of crime?

That said, I do find David Thewlis bizarrely compelling as Jim. Thewlis is wonderful as a man lost in a fog of grief and shame and holding it together with a waspy stiff upper lip, until he gets very drunk then everybody has to know everything he’s got going on. There is an achingly poignant scene late in the film where the title of the movie is introduced and Thewlis as Guest of Honour at someone else's family gathering, gives a rambling drunken speech that is cringe-inducing in the best possible way.

I don’t dislike Guest of Honour nearly as much as many of my critical colleagues seem to, based on the 37% positive rating on RottenTomatoes. I found David Thewlis to be quite remarkable in the movie and Luke Wilson’s thoughtful supporting turn is quite good as well. Atom Egoyan remains a pros pro as a director and stylist and Guest of Honour is fully and completely the work of Atom Egoyan for better or worse.

It's just a shame that Guest of Honour is so maddeningly overwrought. Egoyan stretches to make the twists and turns of Guest of Honour work and perhaps he stretches just a little too far here. The movie is as compelling despairing as much of Egoyan's past work, his style is there, but the story is just too much in the end.

Guest of Honour is available via many on-demand services and virtual cinemas across the country.