The Captive

Captive is Atom Egoyan’s most accessible, riveting film, so most reviewers dumped all over it. Unjustly. It’s a superb analysis of the tensions and effects of a young girl’s abduction and captivity. This is a thriller with rare intelligence and subtlety. Of Egoyan we can expect no less.

In the opening credits the words appear in black against a cold snowbank, then vanish into thin air. Both points encapsulate the story: a girl disappears, then a policewoman, in a world that is harsh and frigid.

The narrative unfolds in fragments. The first scenes shift between characters of unclear identity and connection. Throughout, the film leaps ahead and back in time. Still, it grows easier to follow as we attend to it. The shifts require our more active engagement. That’s important because a lurid fascination with story-telling is as central a concern here as pedophilic pornography. Their common element is sadistic vicariousness.

The film’s structure reflects in its central emblem, the jigsaw puzzle that a cop uses to demonstrate his “visual pattern recognition,” as he reads the whole image out of a random scattering of the puzzle pieces. That phrase resonates. Detective Jeffrey misreads the pattern of visible evidence when he concludes the girl’s father, Matthew, a broke landscaper with an assault conviction, has sold her to a kiddie-porn ring. The mother Tina misreads it by persisting in blaming Matthew for his momentary neglect. 

Thus the girl is not the only captive. Her parents are by the father’s guilt and suspicion and by the mother’s heartbreak and unforgiving rage. Jeffrey is captive to his prejudices and Nicole is briefly imprisoned herself. The creep villain Mika is himself subject to his own perversity, as its captive. But he remains a villain, even when coerced by his jailed cousin to abduct policewoman Nicole to record her memories of sordid suffering.

Mika is an inadequate construction manager working for his mentor's development company. For all his impressive resources in his home and the lavish secured cell Mika is less a developer than a case of arrested development. Still, he encourages his prisoner's efforts in music and composition. In both positive and negative ways, he develops her. Typical of an Egoyan film, the villain mobilizes an array of closed circuit video, so the girl can watch her mother unawares as she cleans her hotel rooms and finds planted reminders of her lost little girl. The videos are again a technological connection but with dehumanizing detachment.

The same play between connection and cold distance works in the storytelling, whether Nicole’s from her prison van or the girl’s. Cassandra saves herself by trapping Mika with another story. Eight years after her abduction she has outgrown her sexual appeal to him. But the porn ring uses her to lure other young girls into their control. She's their "Gateway." Her present hold on him is to tell stories about her childhood, as he’s excited by her suffering. Cassandra’s name recalls the Greek prophetess cursed with being disbelieved. Our Cassandra is more like Scheherazade, staying alive by telling stories, here about her past duress not the future. She saves herself by asking Mika to have an interview taped with her childhood ice-skating dance partner. But first she reminds her father of that boy’s pledge to take no other partner. So he catches the tail-end of the interview and tracks down the creep. She is saved by her father’s and that boy’s constancy. 

The plot is set in Niagara Falls, Ontario, with Detective Jeffrey just transferring from St. Catharines. The latter is the town that was traumatized by the the couple Paul Bernardo and Carla Homolka, who abducted, raped and even killed young girls, including Carla's kid sister. This fiction draws on that awful reality. 

The characters provide some rich moments. The father’s temper is destructive but it speaks to his commitment. When Tina sees Cassie’s face in a TV shot she beams with serene pleasure. But the enormity of the girl’s predicament sinks in, as Tina talks to Matthew on the cellphone. Her radiance crumbles. The last shot, after the family’s three-sided reunion, shows Cassie skating freely into an open rink, free at last, as confident of her unseen partner’s eight-year-old pledge as of her father’s perseverance. 

Of the two main cops Nicole shows a superior integrity over Jeffrey’s pragmatism. She’s appalled by his rough methods and even more when he uses his niece as bait to catch Mika. There are a couple of jarring notes in their presentation. One, they have an affair. Two, to a fundraising dinner at which Nicole is the keynote speaker on the subject of pedapihilic abuse she wears a sensational red gown with the front hitched up above her knees. The gown’s contrast to her police uniform photo on the posters suggests her fullness as a character. Her womanhood extends beyond her official function. Like her affair, her sexy gown shows a normal sexuality that has survived her professional exposure to the criminal perverse. At the same time, that front hitch suggests a vulnerability, setting up her abduction and captivity. The hitch looks like another gateway.

This film is about child pornography, with its web of secrecy and the complicitous engagement of respectable businessmen, the church, politicos and police. Hence Mika's sinister boss and his evasive wife. While Egoyan includes that awareness he’s careful to focus on the family who share the girl’s suffering and he scrupulously omits the lurid. From the Enquirer headlines he pulls a touchingly human story.