DIRECTOR/SCREENWRITER
Atom Egoyan
based on the
novel by
Russell Banks
PRODUCERS
Atom Egoyan
Camelia Frieberg
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Paul Sarossy
MUSIC
Mychael Danna
EDITOR
Susan Shipton
CAST
Ian Holm (Mitchell Stephens)
Sarah Polley (Nicole Burnell)
Maury Chaykin (Wendell Walker)
Peter Donaldson (Schwartz)
Bruce Greenwood (Billy Ansel)
David Hemblen (Abbott Driscoll)
Brooke Johnson (Mary Burnell)
Arsinée Khanjian (Wanda Otto)
Tom McCamus (Sam Burnell)
Stephanie Morgenstern (Allie O'Donnell)
Earl Pastko (Hartley Otto)
Gabrielle Rose (Dolores Driscoll)
Alberta Watson (Risa Walker)
Caerthan Banks (Zoe Stephens)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 112m
U.S. release: November 21, 1997
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
site
|
The
Sweet Hereafter, the
deservedly acclaimed masterpiece by Atom Egoyan, could have been
bad in so many ways that it's tempting to praise it for what
it isn't. It involves a schoolbus accident that takes the lives
of fourteen children, yet it doesn't jerk easy tears with scenes
of the kids flying kites with their parents. It centers on the
attempts of a lawyer to win a settlement on behalf of the grieving
parents, but there's no rousing John Grisham finale in which
Matt Damon tackles the corrupt bigwigs, wins justice for the
parents, and sends us out hollowly satisfied.
No, the satisfaction of The Sweet Hereafter runs deeper.
Working from Russell Banks' fine, painful novel, Egoyan presents
extreme misery and despair -- parents struggling to find meaning
in their children's deaths -- and suggests that there may be
no meaning. "There's no such thing as an accident,"
insists the lawyer, Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm), but some of
the parents know better -- for instance, Billy Ansel (Bruce Greenwood),
who had already lost his wife and has now lost his twin children.
Billy has no illusions, and that's Egoyan's great theme: the
cruelty of illusion -- faith as delusion, as a buffer against
the truth.
Egoyan, like some of his fellow Canadian filmmakers (David Cronenberg,
Denys Arcand), takes his time and keeps a respectful distance.
His previous film, Exotica, was an intricate and interlocking
puzzle that only clicked together near the end. The Sweet
Hereafter is more linear, but not much more: Egoyan has become
so assured a storyteller that he can juxtapose three time frames
(before the accident, the aftermath, and two years later) as
if shuffling a deck of cards. The sequences comment and reflect
on each other, wedded by the metaphor of the Pied Piper -- Robert
Browning's poem, read by Nicole Burnell (Sarah Polley), one of
the accident's few survivors, a moody girl now in a wheelchair.
Mitchell Stephens keeps visiting the broken parents, demanding
that they help him help them. He wants to get to the bottom of
the tragedy; somebody along the line -- the makers of the bus
or the guard rail on the road -- must have been negligent. (His
real nemesis, we feel, is the big maker Himself; there's a touch
of Ahab in this ambulance-chaser.) Mitchell has his own "dead
child": his daughter Zoe, a runaway drug addict who badgers
him over the phone for money. For him, this crusade is about
wresting control out of chaos, and Ian Holm gives us a wrenching
portrait of a self-contained man cracking at the seams. It's
a performance of great, bitter force: Mitchell is driven to save
the children of the world, and the fact that his own child is
lost doesn't make him a hypocrite -- or a hero, either.
Mitchell puts his case in the lap of Nicole, played by the 18-year-old
Polley (an actress to watch) with touching gravity. Nicole's
anguish, we learn, goes far beyond what happened on the bus,
and we see that for many in the town, such as Billy Ansel, the
accident just smothered pain that was already there. You can
only endure so much pain before you shut off and go numb. The
Sweet Hereafter is about a town that has become comfortably
numb, in contrast to Mitchell Stephens, a raw nerve raging against
the injustice of life. Somewhere in the middle is Nicole, who
knows the truth but also knows it can't help anybody. Numb denial
and rage may be understandable responses to tragedy, Egoyan says,
but how useful are they? The adults can rage and deny all they
want; their children will still be just as dead. |
