The Sweet Hereafter (Ian Holm, Bruce Greenwood) 1/2
Pain. Suffering. Loss. Sorrow. Grief. One would think a movie that embodies these tragic facts of life would be an arduous viewing experience, to say the least. When relating them to Atom Egoyan's exquisite The Sweet Hereafter, however, nothing could be further from the truth. For while some motion pictures want nothing more than to tug at your heart strings and start the swelling soundtrack on cue, this one prefers to show the toll a tragedy can take on people in how they must cope and resume their suddenly-empty lives. The people in this movie are not there to bawl, they are haunted and lost.
And yet there is crying and sadness in this film, an adaptation of a novel written by Russell Banks, and it is all the richer for it. It concerns the large impact a disaster can have on a small community. Director Egoyan uses the uniquely Canadian setting of Sam Dent, British Columbia as the setting (replete with many Canuck signposts and scenery). A school bus accident has claimed the lives of 14 children, and those who are left behind do not know what to do with their immeasurable, unmentionable sorrow. Enter lawyer Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm), who has metaphorically lost his own child Zoe (Caerthan Banks) to the clutches of drug addiction. Stephens approaches Sam Dent with only a hint of enthusiasm at the prospect of a settlement. In his eyes, he seems more determined to avenge the losses by pointing blame at someone -- anyone -- he can nail.
The Sweet Hereafter offers a particularly engaging screenplay, and is accompanied by some stark direction and cinematography. As Stephens wanders from potential client to client, the story drifts backward in time to what the small town was like before the accident. It also cuts forward in time to a sombre plane trip Stephens must make to bail Zoe out of yet another spiral of drug use. The actual bus crash itself occurs about midway through the film, but because it is constantly referred to throughout the piece, it is never out of our minds.
The cast is a who's who of Canadian actors, from Sarah Polley as the surviving teen Nicole Burnell, to Bruce Greenwood as the unsettled but common Billy Ansell. Polley and Greenwood previously appeared in my favourite Egoyan film, Exotica. Watch for Arsinée Khanjian and Maury Chaykin as parents of deceased children. Holm is masterful as the eager lawyer; we really come to sympathesize with his character after an extended, gripping monologue he delivers about a near-tragedy from when Zoe was a baby. The actor's eyes and mouth are hypnotic in this scene.
One of the most interesting aspects of The Sweet Hereafter is the way the accident is paralleled with the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Prior to the tragedy, Nicole (Polley) reads the bedtime story to Billy's children, but then herself becomes the "lame child left behind" once she is confined to a wheelchair after the crash. It is a potent image in a movie filled with symbols. Egoyan was nominated in 1998 for Best Director for his challenging work here, and with a thumb flung at conventionally linear plots and stories, he remains one of Canada's premiere moviemakers.
