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Atom Egoyan is one of Canada's finest current filmmakers. He is a master
storyteller, despite (or perhaps, because of) the fact that his films
demand a lot from the audience: in Exotica, for example -- which I'd
rank as his masterpiece to date --, we are at first presented with an array
of very disparate characters that at face value seem to have little in
common with one another; by the end of the movie, however, they have
emerged as nodes in a complex web of personal connections and
interdependencies, a web woven around a tale of tragedy and sadness.
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Another such tale forms the base for his latest movie, The Sweet
Hereafter (which is based on a Russell Banks novel), but where in
Exotica viewers were faced with the task of uncovering the network
of relations the movie presented, they must now come to terms with a
variety of temporal levels on which the story unfolds. Largely, we see the
events through the eyes of Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm), a damages lawyer
who has just come to a small Canadian community which has lost most of its
children when the school bus veered off an icy road and crashed through the
surface of a frozen lake. The townspeople are paralysed by grief, and there
is the feeling of a kind of subterranean anger, made even worse by the
cruelly arbitrary nature of the disaster -- an anger that is poised to break
through the surface eventually; for now, though, time almost stands
still here as the parents attempt to cling to life before the accident.
This desperate reluctance to move on into the present is emphasised by
the many flashbacks through which the story is told: Mitchell visits the
devastated parents and listens to their recollections of the past, attempting
to harness their anger and gather them as well as the bus driver in a class
action law suit against the bus manufacturer.
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In the course of these sessions, community life is reconstructed for the
viewer through the many glimpses at a time before the tragedy, reinforcing
the feeling of loss and despair in the present. These events are further
linked to the reality of the present, and to the world outside this place
of mindnumbing pain, by way of the calls Mitchell receives on his
cellphone: it emerges that Mitchell's own family has disintegrated due to
the drug addiction of his daughter, who now only contacts him to ask for
more money. Powerless and without anyone to blame for his personal tragedy,
it seems, he is channelling his anger into the class actions he stirs up.
And this becomes the central question of the movie: how do we deal with
unexpected disaster, with a pain and a directionless anger that seem too
large to overcome? Certainly, Mitchell's efforts aren't universally
appreciated: his investigations uncover much more than just the circumstances
of the accident itself, and generally there is a good deal of animosity
against the lawyer for his uninvited intrusions into the parents' grief.
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The story is masterfully interwoven with the tale of the Pied Piper of
Hamelin, excerpts of which subtly appear at key
points in the movie to comment on the inner turmoil of its characters.
Mitchell is a troubled Piper, a grief-profiteer who thrusts himself onto
the town's community with a tune promising monetary riches that still
cannot make up for the loss of the children. His potential key witness is
the only child to survive the crash, Nicole (Sarah Polley), who is now
confined to a wheelchair: in the Piper story, she is the lame child that
escaped; a constant reminder of the accident, her role now becomes to help
the adults find a way through the pain to the sweet hereafter -- and her
choice of whether or not to help Mitchell's law suit becomes crucial. The
link to the Pied Piper story is ambiguous, though: the town's children are
already lost, no matter whether Mitchell is paid to attempt to drown
the rats of grief (as one reading could go) or not.
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The film could easily have turned out overly melodramatic or utterly bleak;
however, as Egoyan jumps between the memories and different levels of
present time, we gradually discover a variety of ways in which these people
do begin to deal with their feelings of loss, guilt, and anger. To the director's credit, he
avoids both a Hollywoodian overload of pathos and a too-radical overdose of
hopelessness, and rather presents a believable community of characters who
must, in the absence of easy solutions, find their own ways of coping.
The Sweet Hereafter also profits from a cast in which a driven,
tragic Ian Holm joins a number of Canadian cinema's best current actors,
including Egoyan regulars Arsinée Khanjian and the amazingly
changeable Bruce Greenwood, as well as Earl Pastko, Gabrielle Rose and
Maury Chaykin. It's not an easy movie, and it demands some attention from
its audience in order to sort out the different levels of narrative time,
but despite the bleak subject matter it ends as an encouraging tale of the
victory of acceptance over anger. Highly recommended.
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Details
The Sweet Hereafter, by Fine Line Features, 1997.
Director: Atom Egoyan, based on a novel by Russell Banks.
Cinematography: Paul Sarossy.
Cast: Ian Holm, Sarah Polley, Bruce Greenwood, Gabrielle Rose.
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Citation reference for this article
MLA style:
Axel Bruns. "Grief and Anger: Atom Egoyan's 'The Sweet Hereafter'." M/C Reviews 31 Oct. 1998.
[your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/screen/sweet.html>.
Chicago style:
Axel Bruns, "Grief and Anger: Atom Egoyan's 'The Sweet Hereafter'," M/C Reviews 31 Oct. 1998,
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/screen/sweet.html> ([your date of access]).
APA style:
Axel Bruns. (1998) Grief and anger: Atom Egoyan's 'The sweet hereafter'. M/C Reviews 31 Oct. 1998.
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/screen/sweet.html> ([your date of access]).
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![[image]](http://posters.imdb.com/Covers/12/02/55.jpg)