Adore is, at its core, inconceivably silly. Despite characteristically strong performances by Naomi Watts and Robin Wright, the film is on the border of pushing the envelope and devolving to ludicrousness. As life-long friends, Lil (Watts) and Roz (Wright) are inseparable. Their childhoods spent together floating on a raft in the water is only a testament to the island that they both inhabit. Shortly after the film begins, Lil’s unseen husband perishes and we witness his funeral, with Roz at her side. Also flanking them are their respective sons who grow with the same camaraderie that Roz and Lil share.
However, there’s an awkwardness on afternoon as the two middle-aged women lay on the beach, watching their sons surfing. The boys’ muscles glisten in the sun and salt water, and prompts Lil to observe that they are like gods. The foreshadowing here is rather palpable, so when Ian (Xavier Samuel), Lil’s son, sleeps with Roz, it’s less a surprise and more of an anticipated moment to move the movie along.
The same can be said for the supposed retaliation that Roz’s son Tom (James Frechville) takes on Ian – or his mom? – when he sleeps with Lil. Or, maybe he’s taking his revenge on Lil seeing as that he has vested interest aside from “doing to her what Ian did to” his mom.
The convoluted nature of this x-shaped narrative hardly makes the film provocative; rather, it devolves the film to a boring realm of creative bankruptcy. I suppose it’s understandable why Tom is hurt by Ian’s actions, but the one glaring omission from this narrative is that Roz is still married. We meet her husband. He seems a bit distant emotionally – and physically in that he takes a job in Sydney thirty minutes into the movie – but it’s never clear why he deserves to be so readily cuckolded.
Then there’s the allusion to Roz and Lil’s potential homosexuality, something not lost on Roz’s husband who notes that the women are sort of “lezbos,” and Lil who repeatedly refutes that they are “lezbos.” Thus, at times, the film tries to convince us that the two women sharing each other’s son is a way of reliving their own youths.
But again, there is little interest in Roz’s infidelity – at least as far as her husband is concerned.
But there is the perfunctory need for both women to swear that both transgressions were one time occurrences that can never happen again. Why? Because this is the apparently necessary reaction, but there is never any real discussion as to why the transgressions are wrong.
It’s as if we’re supposed to assume that our moral compasses all point in the same way. This is not to suggest that friends should start dating with and sleeping with their peers’ mothers. However, if a film is going to attempt to be provocative and explore an often-unopened box – Y Tu Mama Tambien notwithstanding – then there should be some discourse or some substance beyond the perfunctory: this is wrong because it will most likely be seen as awkward and uncomfortable for the audience.
