The Adjuster: Superhero for the End of History

The poster for Atom Egoyan’s The Adjuster (1991) does and does not suggest pulpiness. Elias Koteas stands perpendicular to the frame, drawing taut an arrow, prepared to let it fly out the window of his suburban home. A woman’s legs jut forth from near the viewer’s vantage point. Koteas wears just a towel wrapped around his waist. Presumably, if the title itself didn’t evoke “the Crow” or the B-movie antics of 50s fare like The Fly (1958) and The Blob (1958), the poster wouldn’t either. But Koteas’ stance, taken alongside the title, made me think of the Bat Signal, the superhero at his perch, watching for something. But what?

In The Adjuster’s case, it’s fire. He is, in fact, nothing more than an insurance adjuster, though I think a kind of superhero (or anti-superhero) all the same. As with all Egoyan movies, there’s no simple plot to summarize. The writer-director likes to take his time, setting us up with various characters only to slowly draw them together, lines of dominos prepared for intersection at precise points. This won’t be a Marvel movie.

Noah Render (Elias Koteas) stays up nights. It’s not clear if he ever sleeps. He waits for his phone to ring, alerting him of another fire, another family to help. Render takes them all to the same motel, where the wait staff and owners marvel at his warmth, the care he shows these victims awaiting their payouts. In reality, his affect is confused and cold. He just repeats “you’re in shock. You may not realize it, but you’re in shock.” We do, nonetheless, know that the hotel staff is on to something—he sleeps with many of his clients. And they do seem happy.

Slowly but surely this dedication erodes his home life. His wife, who works censoring pornographic films, grows more distant. They see each other less. Her nightmares increase, left in bed alone by the Adjuster.

Noah finds his parallel in Bubba (Maury Chaykin), a wealthy, sad, corpulent man. His servile relationship to his wife, who forces him to spend money on elaborate sexual fantasies leaves him drained and aimless. How his story intersects with Noah’s is not for me to reveal here.

What joins these two characters is their utter absorption in the lives of others and how that obsession destroys them. This is the sense in which a movie about an insurance adjuster is a kind of wry nod to the superhero film. Egoyan posits that to dissolve oneself in the world is ultimately not to attain enlightenment. Or, at least, the way in which these men try to do so produces only the opposite—a kind of narcissistic self-destruction.

Arsinée Khanjian, Egoyan’s wife, plays Noah’s partner in The Adjuster. One wonders if the whole thing is a meditation on giving one’s life over to art. But that’s a rumination for another day…