Felicia's Journey

Evil and catastrophe have no explanation, Atom Egoyan demonstrated with searing eloquence in his last film, The Sweet Hereafter -- which is why they can be transcended. Nonetheless, he tries to come up with explanations in his adaptation of William Trevor's schematic novel Felicia's Journey, and his conclusions are much less satisfying. The title wanderer (Elaine Cassidy) is a naive teenager from an intolerant small town in Ireland. Pregnant and denounced by her father, she heads to an industrially blighted England in search of her faithless lover. There she is assisted by Hilditch (a lubricious Bob Hoskins), manager of dining services in a large plant, who offers to help her. He has ulterior motives, of course, and the sly, wheedling duplicity with which he insinuates Felicia into his tawdry, sadistic delusions makes for fascinating if irritating viewing.

The problem with Felicia's Journey is not so much the nature of evil as the failure of sympathy. Hoskins has never equaled the pathos or humor of his performance in Mona Lisa, and those qualities are sadly lacking here; Hilditch is just a creep, and delving into his past doesn't make him any more appealing. And Cassidy's Felicia is an infuriatingly passive victim. Egoyan does manage some of his wry reflexivity in scenes where Hilditch reverently watches tapes of his mother's old BBC cooking show -- it's Psycho by way of The French Chef. And some of The Sweet Hereafter's quasi-mysticism surges toward the end as the journey takes an unexpected turn. Otherwise, the terrain is familiar: a bus ride with no unscheduled stops.

-- Peter Keough