Review of Felicia's Journey (1999) by Alex M — 27 Feb 2004

[size=3]Canadian director Atom Egoyan has demonstrated throughout his career that he is drawn to stories about the lasting scars that are formed in childhood and plague an adult for the rest of his or her life. In his thriller [i]Felicia's Journey[/i], Egoyan focuses on two characters: a young girl named Felicia (Elaine Cassidy) who has travelled to England to find the boyfriend who deserted her, and a middle-aged catering manager (played by Bob Hoskins) who seems friendly but has odd personality quirks and disturbing secrets. Egoyan's film begins slowly, but as we are allowed to understand the depth of the two protagonists' pain, and begin to recognize the caterer's disturbed psyche, [i]Felicia's Journey [/i]becomes quite powerful and intense. As with many Egoyan movies, [i]Felicia's Journey [/i]frequently employs flashbacks to tell its story, but unlike Egoyan's [i]Exotica[/i], the device does not hinder the power of the story. What prevents [i]Felicia's Journey [/i]from achieving the mixture of compassion and suspense that Hitchcock demonstrated in films like [i]Strangers on a Train [/i]is that Egoyan often seems to be standing outside his characters. While the script of the film (based on a novel by William Taylor) goes to great pains to empathize with all of the major characters, Egoyan occasionally mocks the caterer's eccentricities, which makes him a more cartoonish villain (and less of a potential threat) than he should be. Bob Hoskins finds many moments that suggest the inner torment of his character, but there are other times when he is content to whisper ominously in order to chill the audience. Cassidy holds her own against Hoskins, even though the character of Felicia is naturally upstaged. Egoyan allows us to care about the outcome of [i]Felicia's Journey [/i]up to a point, but the rather tidy ending is something of a disappointment. The movie creates an unsettling portrait of two wounded characters, and if it had only been a more effective psychological thriller, [i]Felicia's Journey [/i]might have emerged as Egoyan's best film.[/size].

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