Supposedly, Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan has always wanted to make an epic film about the 1915 Armenian genocide but knew he'd never be able to raise enough money to get his elaborate idea off the ground.  Instead, he made Ararat – a movie about what it may have been like to tackle his dream project.  If Egoyan's plan was to shed light on the little-known atrocity (around 1.5 million people – or two-thirds of Armenia's population – was said to have been slaughtered), his mission was a success.  But Ararat's extremely non-linear narrative has turned off more than its share of viewers.  I caught the North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, where hometown boy Egoyan's pictures are generally received with much fanfare, glowing reviews and very strong word-of-mouth.  Ararat garnered none of these things.

Call me crazy, brothers and sisters, but I kind of dug the way Egoyan structured his unique story.  I'm getting weary of simply being taken from Point A to Point B without any originality or flair.  Give me something that will keep me guessing.  Mix it up a little bit, like Memento, or even television's Boomtown.  So if you have a tough time wrapping your puny brain around entertainment like that, go next-door and watch I Spy.  Though we don't initially know it, most of Ararat is told via flashback as 18-year-old production assistant Raffi (newcomer David Alpay) is detained and questioned by a soon-to-be-retired airport security officer named David (Christopher Plummer, A Beautiful Mind) about the contents of three sealed film canisters.

As David interrogates Raffi, we learn the gory, entangled details of both his personal life and the movie he's worked on for the last several months. Raffi's mom Ani (Arsinée Khanjian, Fat Girl) is an art historian specializing in the works of Arshile Gorky (Simon Abkarian, The Truth About Charlie) and has been hired as a technical consultant on the film.  Ani is at odds with Celia (Marie-Josée Croze, Maelström), who is both her stepdaughter and Raffi's girlfriend, because of a mysterious death that may have been murder, suicide or completely accidental.

The interlocked stories don't end with Raffi, either, as we also learn about David's strained relationship with his gay son (Brent Carver), who both works security where Ani gives a Gorky lecture and dates one of the genocide film's stars (Elias Koteas, Collateral Damage).  And in keeping with the tradition of filmmakers taking liberties with history for dramatic purposes when they make their epics, the director (Charlie's troubadour Charles Aznavour) and producer (Eric Bogosian, Igby Goes Down) make their protagonist into a lily-white American, portrayed by a clueless actor (Bruce Greenwood, Thirteen Days), just so he can be the picture's Great White Hope.

That's a lot going on for a movie that doesn't even hit the two-hour mark, isn't it?  One might say Ararat is just too ambitious, and it does seem that way for the first half.  But once you settle into its time-shifting groove, things begin to flow nicely.  Then again, there may have been more going on than I realized (on account of me being slow and all).  Ararat is to Egoyan what Schindler's List was to Spielberg, and I suspect there is a lot of hidden subtext in the dialogue that flew way over the heads of people who can't even find Armenia on a map.

Ararat's acting is all solid, with Alpay – who could be Elijah Wood's double in The Lord of the Rings movies – making an impressive feature-film debut.  I had a bit of a problem with the use of the airport security thing as a device for flashback, but that's mostly because I kept imagining dozens of terrorists sneaking past David's post while he pontificates about the contents of the sealed film canisters.  I'm also a little leery of the movie-within-a-movie thing since Full Frontal, but it's handled in a far more successful manner here.

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for violence, sexuality/nudity and language