‘The Adjuster’ (R)

Atom Egoyan weighs the cost of living, financial and emotional, and finds it's almost worthless in "The Adjuster." Another chilly social comedy from the enigmatic director, it furthers Egoyan's meditation on human relationships as devalued by the demon media. What saves him from being just another infophobe is he knows he's part of the problem upon which he ruminates.

This film, like the earlier, funkier "Speaking Parts" and "Family Viewing," takes place in Canada, the land of perpetual ennui. The all-too-cryptic tale of an insurance adjuster, Noah (Elias Koteas), and his distant wife, Hera (Arsinee Khanjian), it concerns sex, lies, videotapes and cellular phones. It chronicles the North American passion for not reaching out and touching someone.

The handsome Noah and his comely wife sleep in twin beds like characters in a 1950s TV sitcom in spite of, or perhaps because of, Hera's grueling work as a censor at a Kafkaesque government agency that grades pornographic films. Hera and her equally insensate colleagues spend the days viewing and rating the lewd materials, which she then tapes for her sister, who has become addicted to them. In turn, a Peeping Tom watches her watching the pornography (none of which is shown on-screen).

Noah spends his days and his nights tending to the needs of his clients, most of them victims of fires involving faulty wiring. Upon relocating them at an inexpensive but homey motel, the oddball Noah goes about the business of evaluating their lifestyles. "Was this a purebred?" he asks a gay couple whose dog still smolders in the ashes of their apartment. Nevertheless, the adjuster is noted for his bedside manner and frequently conducts itemizations while locked in the victims' grateful, sweaty embrace.

A second couple -- Bubba (Maury Chaykin) and Mimi (Gabrielle Rose) -- slide into the story by way of a particularly graceless encounter in a subway. A wealthy former football player and his pathetically narcissistic lover, the pair find sexual gratification in simulating other people's lives. In this instance, he's a puking, mewling bum and she is a bored society matron who seduces him before a carload gravid with already weary, now grossed-out morning commuters.

After a time, Bubba and Mimi become attracted to Noah and Hera's tract mansion in a bankrupt development and their imagined lifestyle. Pretending to be a scout for a movie location, Bubba rents the isolated arklike dwelling, an act that teaches Noah a thing or two about keeping up the payments on one's home insurance policy -- not with a measure, but a magnum of irony. A sex comedy that is neither erotic nor funny, "The Adjuster" is Egoyan at his least subtle and most repetitious, a kind of Atom bombardment.