Blessed Stranger: After Flight 111 (Kate Nelligan, Hugh Thompson) 1/2
Prior to last year's terrible tragedy of the falling of the Towers, airplane crashes had nevertheless been on the rise and becoming more and more frequent. However, up until the late summer of 1998, Atlantic Canada was exempt from the horrors of such disasters. When Swissair flight 111 ended up crashing into the waters off the coast of Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia was suddenly put under a rather intense, global microscope.
I was living in Halifax at the time it happened, and it was a little surreal to walk to work for those first one or two weeks when news vehicles from so many networks were converging on the city. I initially assumed that they would set up their base of operations closer to Peggy's Cove. Passing a CBS van, then an ABC van, and a CNN truck, and so on, was pretty surreal at times. These media doorstops were mere distractions however, from what was really on the mind of most Nova Scotians, and those were the 229 victims who died, their families, and the rescue workers who tried so valiantly to salvage what they could from the crash.
The first ten or fifteen minutes of the made-for-TV movie Blessed Stranger: After Flight 111 depicts some of those people on that tragic night, but spends the rest of the film dealing with the psychological damage they suffered. I guess that's an interesting approach to the tragedy, but it makes for rather monotonous viewing after a while. While it's noble that CTV tried to make this movie as tactful as possible, their decision not to present any of the crash, or set up any pre-crash scenes makes everything else sort of wishy-washy. True, those who were impacted by Flight 111 only had their grief and bewilderment to go on, but why should that make for particularly affecting moviemaking? The whole piece is a shroud of gloom, using fictional characters, to boot.
Blessed Stranger stars Kate Nelligan as Kate O'Rourke, an American mother who flies to Halifax as soon as she hears of the accident. Things don't look hopeful when she finds her daughter's new sweater among the salvaged debris. She notices, however, that the sleeve has been mysteriously sewn back on. That's because a local fisherman by the name of Everett Barkhouse (Hugh Thompson) had found it on that first night. Does Everett know what happened to Kate's daughter? Well of course he does, and the rest of the movie stretches this plot point beyond our patience. This kind of trick is more befitting a Shakespearean comedy than a Canadian movie of the week.
It's great to see a lot of Atlantic Canadians in the supporting cast (I even recognized a few of them), but this movie may have been made a little too soon after Flight 111 to really be as respectful or, frankly, as good as it could have been. I'll never forget what it was like to be so close to such a severe tragedy. Perhaps instead of a hypothetical scenario between an obsessed woman and a fisherman, the producers could have presented authentic characters based on the real people involved. In my opinion, that would have made for a far more touching and involving movie.
