The Sweet Hereafter (1997)

Director: Atom Egoyan
Stars: Ian Holm, Sarah Polley, Caerthan Banks

Atom Egoyan's haunting adaptation of the Russell Banks novel The Sweet Hereafter was the Canadian filmmaker's most successful film to date, taking home a Special Grand Jury Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival and scoring a pair of Academy Award nominations, including Best Director. Restructured to fit Egoyan's signature mosaic narrative style, the story concerns the cultural aftershocks which tear apart a small British Columbia town in the wake of a school-bus accident which leaves a number of local children dead. Ian Holm stars as Mitchell Stephens, a big-city lawyer who arrives in the interest of uniting the survivors to initiate a lawsuit; his maneuvering only drives the community further apart, reopening old wounds and jeopardizing any hopes of emotional recovery. Like so many of Egoyan's features, The Sweet Hereafter is a serious and painfully honest exploration of family grief; no character is immune from the sense of utter devastation which grips the film, not even the attorney, whose interests are in part motivated by his own remorse over the fate of his daughter, an HIV-positive drug addict.

The opening shot of Atom Egoyan's majestic, heartfelt adaptation of The Sweet Hereafter is a slow tracking shot that moves to the right along a wood panel wall until it slowly reveals a serene, delicate portrait of a seemingly happy family - a wife and husband curled up together with their young infant lying between them. The shot is a memory, or perhaps an idealization of a time long past, and keys the audience into one of the key themes in the film - in a period of post-tragedy, how do human beings grieve and process the pain and regret that is constantly rehashed through memories? Non-chronologically following four characters in a small town following a tragic school bus accident, the film focuses on the periods prior to and following the accident and uses the actual accident as an impetus for studying the nature of human suffering, rather than a singular narrative event carefully placed for maximum emotional impact. Ian Holm is remarkable as Mitchell, a lawyer who shows up in town to start a class-action law suit with the victims of the accident by trying to find fault with anyone who could be blamed for it. His arrival stirs up the town by forcing them to reflect on the tragedy, which inevitably creates confusion and bitterness, but his own secrets are behind the motives for his actions.

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The non-chronological unfolding of events allows Egoyan to avoid simplifying these situations into direct cause-and-effect situations and instead molds the past, present, and future into a tapestry of the cyclical nature of human suffering. Each of the four points-of-view that we experience have different methods of processing their pain and coming to terms with their grief - Nicole (Sarah Polley), who becomes crippled in the accident, becomes tired of the manipulation and dishonesty that surrounds her as her father uses her condition for monetary gain; Dolores, the bus driver whose entire life was based around these children and driving her bus and now wants only her fellow townspeople to believe in her innocence; Wendell, the drunk who believes that the investigation and law suit are methods to avoid dealing with the reality that sometimes senseless things happen and innocent people needlessly die; and Mitchell, whose inability to cope with his daughter's incessant self-destructive behavior has made him feel so guilty and helpless, that he holds onto the string belief that there is always someone to blame for a tragedy.

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What makes The Sweet Hereafter so emotionally potent is how the four stories each provide a new perspective on the events and the infinite ways people deal with, or deny, their grief. It never begs for our sympathy or pity, instead focusing on the multitude of actions and emotions as the truth comes to the surface. For such a devastating film, it's surprisingly subtle - it really snuck up on me during my first viewing, so much so that I watched it again a few days later just to process everything I had just seen - and the pacing which at first allows us ample time to soak in the serene, picturesque setting leaves room for the moral and ethical challenges that dominate the final hour. By almost completely bypassing the brutality of the accident and its immediate impact, The Sweet Hereafter is about more than just one event, but an invigorating study of the multitude of ways the mind deals with adverse circumstances individually and within the confines of a community.

Cinematic Reflections

The Sweet Hereafter asks the audience to share unimaginable pain.
It details, without sentiment or manipulation, how parents react when a school bus crash takes the lives of almost every child in their small town.
Their stunned grief needs no embellishment, and writer-director Atom Egoyan adds none to his version of Russell Banks' novel. A master at the art of less, the director doesn't dwell on the accident, a moment we experience mostly by watching the face of a parent who is driving behind the bus.

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Billy Ansell (Bruce Greenwood), is the widowed father of the two young children who are waving at him the moment the bus goes off the road. Of all the parents, he has the most to suffer, through the torture of what he has seen. Yet, he is the one who stands in opposition when grief threatens to tear the town apart.

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The instrument of destruction is a lawyer, Mitchell Stephens, brilliantly played by Ian Holm, who arrives to represent the parents in a lawsuit. They begin to embrace his determination that someone must pay for a loss beyond price. Someone must have been at fault, he tells them. ''I want to represent your anger, not your grief,'' he says. Billy understands the danger of Mitchell's siren song to the town. Eventually, so does crash survivor Nicole Burnell (Sarah Polley), a teen-ager damaged by more than her broken spine.

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The movie is no simple-minded lawyer-bashing. Mitchell is as important a character as any of the parents, and we learn – via flashbacks he narrates during a long plane flight – that he too harbors a parent's grief and rage over a lost child.

With Robert Browning's The Pied Piper of Hamelin running through the film like a ghostly theme, The Sweet Hereafter visits the impossible contradictions of bereavement with clear-eyed compassion. Not many filmmakers could make that trip. Mr. Egoyan navigates it with cogence, skill and an eye for the fully human.

The Cincinnati Enquirer

Special Features:
- Feature length commentary with Atom Egoyan and Russell Banks
- Video discussiion with Banks and Egoyan on the book and the film
- Q & A interviews with members of the cast
- The Charlie Rose Show interview with Atom Egoyan
- Robert Browning's poem The Piep Piper of Hamelin with illustrations by Kate Greenaway
- Isolated score by composer Mychael Danna
- U.S. and Canadian theatrical trailers
- Biographies and filmographies

Mychael Danna - The Sweet H... Picture Soundtrack (1997)