The Sweet Hereafter (1997)

Starring Ian Holm, Sarah Polley, Bruce Greenwood and Tom McCamus

Written by Atom Egoyan, based on the Russell Banks novel

Directed by Atom Egoyan

Egyptian-born Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan has been in the news recently for losing his appeal of the NC-17 rating for his new film Where the Truth Lies. If his name isn’t ringing any bells, then you’re not alone; like Jim Jarmusch or John Sayles, Egoyan lives on the fringes of mainstream cinema, occasionally bubbling up into the pop culture slipstream with an Oscar nomination or the debut a new film at Cannes or the Toronto Film Festival, but otherwise working entirely below radar. In my past five years of degenerate alcoholism, gunrunning and Internet porn-site operations, all of which have kept me away from movies, I confess that I had mostly forgotten about him myself.

But word of his battles with the censors has stirred memories of what may indeed be one of the top five movies of the 1990s. If you haven’t yet availed yourself of The Sweet Hereafter, then you owe yourself this special treat. For those who need catharsis and closure in their movies, the film offers precious little of either. But if you appreciate soulful, mind-blowing works of fiction, then for God’s sake rent it immediately.

The Sweet Hereafter, winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes, tells a story the likes of which you can see on Fox News on any given evening. In the tiny, mountainous town of Sam Dent, British Columbia, a school bus full of children skids off an icy road, onto a frozen lake, and then plunges into the freezing water. Fourteen of the children drown. Left in the wake of this tragedy are the grieving parents, the bus driver and an older girl who survived the crash, but who is doomed to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair.

Enter big city attorney Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm), who arrives to round up the parents in a class action lawsuit. Never mind that Dolores, the bus driver (Gabrielle Rose), swears she simply hit a patch of ice. Never mind that the mechanic who serviced the bus before the accident, and who was following it when it happened, wants nothing to do with a lawsuit. "There is no such thing as an accident," Mitchell tells the parents. "The word has no meaning." Someone is responsible, and someone must pay.

Like most films that exist at the rarified level of art, The Sweet Hereafter is built around emotional revelations rather than around plot points. We bounce wildly around the timeline: one minute we’re watching Mitchell meet with the parents, the next minute we’re returning to the time before the accident, then to its immediate aftermath, and then to a coda two years later as Mitchell takes a flight to California to pick up his daughter Zoe (Caerthan Banks), a drug addict who is dying of AIDS. As we move through the devastated town, as we insinuate ourselves into the lives of its people, we learn their secrets, and we learn that in many instances the dead children got off far easier than their parents did. And we learn that Mitchell Stephens has a personal stake in placing blame for the tragedy.

On the surface, this story seems ready-made for a weepy Oxygen Channel made-for-cable opus— or at least a Rob Reiner film. As fashioned by novelist Russell Banks and Egoyan, however, The Sweet Hereafter is a powerful meditation on the hidden meanings behind a devastating tragedy. It also offers a hard lesson on the awesome responsibility that comes with being a parent. I don’t have kids, but this film gave me the sense of what it must feel like to love a child with the kind of helpless, soul shaking need that would make you take a bullet to protect your son or daughter. Your own life becomes prologue.

This is a film rich in metaphor. The staggering beauty of the snowbound mountains serves as a visual reminder of the emotional chill that has descended upon the town. The Robert Browning poem "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," which Egoyan added as his own contribution to the story, serves as a metaphor of such complexity that its meaning changes with every scene. Is the bus accident the "pied piper" that led the children away from the town? Or are the parents the "children" being led astray by Mitchell Stephens? Clearly Nicole Burnell (Sarah Polley), the budding teenage musician who becomes a crippled survivor, is meant to echo the lame child in Browning’s poem who is unable to follow the piper. There is an implied incestuous relationship between Nicole and her father Sam (Tom McCamus), which would lead us to believe she is emotionally as well as physically handicapped. But she may also be the wisest person in town.

As if the fascinating complexity of the script and Egoyan’s elegiac camera work weren’t enough, we’re also treated to uniformly excellent performances. Ian Holm, one of the best character actors of the past twenty years, is devastating as Mitchell Stephens, a man who knows too well the noose of guilt and shame that comes with a lost child. He tells the story of rushing his infant daughter to a distant hospital to save her from a deadly spider bite, and how the doctor told him to bring a knife with him in the car in case he had to perform an emergency tracheotomy on her. We see the image of his daughter gazing up at him while he holds the knife poised above her throat, and we understand that to be a parent is to walk the razor’s edge between saving our children and destroying them. Also critical are Polley, who becomes the emotional center of the film, and Bruce Greenwood as Billy, the mechanic who has lost everything dear to him but who can still see clearly enough to know that Mitchell’s lawsuit is an abomination. No one shouts in this film, and there are few tears. But the emotions on display are real, raw and expertly revealed.

If there’s a knock on Egoyan’s work, it’s that his films are cold, intellectual exercises that leave mainstream audiences feeling as if they’ve just been smacked in the face with a dead mackerel. The Sweet Hereafter does avoid the obvious weeping and gnashing of teeth with which most movies of this stripe are filled, and you may not find yourself reaching for the Kleenex. But if it’s ham-handed sentimentality you’re after, then go watch Steel Magnolias again. When the credits roll, these characters are still deeply wounded. Some may never heal. But a few of them may emerge, at the end of a long and bitter road, as stronger people, pounded and reshaped in the forge of loss into something greater than themselves.

Is there meaning in senseless tragedy? Only God knows for sure. Absent His divine interpretation, however, it’s the duty of those of us left behind to give meaning and direction to our lives. With this film, Russell Banks and Atom Egoyan have given us some useful signposts.

September 13, 2005
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