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  The Sweet Hereafter July 12, 1998 Reporter : Peters Verdict - A rare & wonderful film. Director - Atom Egoyan Main Cast - Ian Holm, Bruce Greenwood, Sarah Polley, Tom McCamus Rated - m Genre - Drama Showing at - Verona in Sydney, and other Independent cinemas nationally.  Atom Egoyan has been on the so-called art-house fringe of the mainstream, at least until recently. Uncompromisingly individualistic, he makes films around his own intimate, personal obsessions. Perhaps it’s a natural step in his growth as an artist that this film, “The Sweet Hereafter”, works on a much broader level. But it’s also the first time he’s based a film on someone else’s original idea. Novelist Russell Banks, in turn, based his novel on a real event, an accident involving a school bus which killed several children, all residents of a small town in Texas.  Sarah Polley as Nicole Egoyan has transposed the story to the savagely beautiful landscape of western Canada but the emotional landscape is as close as the house next door. In these days when so much filmmaking is stolidly literal, it’s liberating to see a film where the images are given time to work on a poetic level. Egoyan takes ample time to show us the school bus winding through the hills as it has done a thousand times before. He never shows us the accident in detail. This isn’t “Titanic” where hundreds of people die before our very eyes. Instead, Egoyan moves forward, backward and sideways in time, living simultaneously in the future, the past and the present.  The film's winding bus trip After the accident, which comes nearly an hour after the opening titles, a stranger arrives in town—he actually arrives at the beginning of the film. Typical of the imaginative flourishes that Egoyan takes, the visitor is trapped inside his car, inside a car wash. When he finally gets out, he wanders through the deserted service station, looking for someone, anyone to blame. Instead, he discovers the wrecked bus, standing dismally in the fading light. The story is told mainly through the presence of this stranger. He’s Mitchell Stevens, a lawyer, and he’s what the Americans call an ambulance chaser—he’s come to this small, bereft community to organise their fight for financial compensation. And he’s fantastically good at it. Even the most stubborn parents, like Wanda and Hartley Otto, yield to his passionate advocacy. Egoyan weaves a dozen different stories into the fabric of “The Sweet Hereafter”. The bus accident interrupts many of these stories in mid-sentence. It leaves lives in limbo, incapable of movement. Mitchell Stevens offers a way out, an end to their helplessness. Or so it seems. For some, like Billy Ansell who watched his children die, Stevens is the worst thing that could have happened to the grieving town. Most of the actors in the film have worked with the director before and they seem perfectly at home in his universe. The newcomer is formidable English actor Ian Holm who has the kind of quicksilver intelligence that perfectly suits the character of Mitchell Stevens. There’s far more to this man than appears on the surface and his rage against the injustice and pain of loss is deeply rooted in his own bitter history. The other major role in this largely ensemble drama is Nicole, played by the remarkable young actress Sarah Polley. Nicole is one of the children on the bus and one of the few survivors, although she’s crippled in the accident. The irony is that Nicole was robbed of her childhood by her father who stepped beyond the bounds of parental trust. It falls to Nicole to somehow cut through the tangle of conflicting agendas generated by the tragedy… In Egoyan’s most inspired addition to Russell Banks’s novel, he makes use of Robert Browning’s chilling poem “The Pied Piper Of Hamlin” even adding verses of his own. And in one of the most telling scenes, he allows a child whom Nicole is babysitting to cut through to the truth of the poem, and the film. I’m often sceptical of my own initial reactions to films, or anything else for that matter. In the case of “The Sweet Hereafter”, it took me a long time to fully appreciate what Egoyan had done. It’s a very complex piece of work with many important parts of the puzzle referred to only obliquely. Perhaps it needs to be seen more than once, even by people smarter than me. But it certainly deserves to be seen. Egoyan weaves a dozen different stories into the fabric of “The Sweet Hereafter”. My considered opinion is that it’s a rare and wonderful film. |
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