What's In 'The Sweet Hereafter'?

March 24, 1998

I'm in such awe of this movie, and the movies of Atom Egoyan, that I fear I could go on all day about it. His last movie, Exotica, had me wrapped up in thought for weeks. And his newest film, The Sweet Hereafter drew me to Tampa to see it. I couldn't wait for it - I drove two and a half hours just for a movie.

But what a movie! - easily one of the best of this decade, ranking right up there with Schindler's List, Goodfellas, Unforgiven, and Breaking The Waves. And its emotional complexity and nuance just blew me away. Seeing the film for the second time the other night, I couldn't help but be even further amazed.

The Sweet Hereafter is a modern retelling of the 'Pied Piper of Hamlin' poem by Robert Browning, which, if you all remember, tells how all the children of the town of Hamlin are taken by the Piper after the townspeople refused to pay him for his getting rid of all the rats. In The Sweet Hereafter, the Piper comes in the form of a school bus crash that kills nearly all of the children of the town of Sam Dent. And while the people of Hamlin had the Piper to blame for their miseries, the people of Sam Dent do not. The bus crash was a freak accident, something that happened without cause or explanation. The movie examines the different ways in which several of the townspeople cope (both successfully and unsuccessfully) with this loss and accept that what happened had no explanation.

At the center of the movie is a lawyer, Mitchell Stevens (in a awe-inducing performance by Ian Holm), who has come to Sam Dent for business. He goes around to several of the grieving parents and tells them that he is there 'to direct their rage' - that he wants to sue the negligent party responsible for the accident, whether it be the town for putting up a weak guardrail or the manufacturers of the bus for putting in a faulty part.

At first, you think he's just another money-grubbing lawyer, but you soon discover that while Stevens is trying to channel the grief and anger of the townspeople, he too is grappling with the fact that his drug-addicted daughter is dying herself. He actually relates to the pain of his clients.

Also great in the film are Egoyan regulars Bruce Greenwood and Sarah Polley, both of whom starred in Exotica. Greenwood plays Billy Ansel, a man who witnesses the bus accident and the death of his children while still coping with the loss of his wife to cancer. Polley, who also sings on the soundtrack, plays Nicole, a survivor left crippled from the crash. With her saddened eyes and calmness of voice, she comes across as the one person with a sane perspective on the whole tragedy - the only person who hasn't been stricken by grief or by the greed of impending settlements. She is the one person who, as the tag line to the movie says, realizes that in dealing with loss 'there is no such thing as the simple truth.'

Director Atom Egoyan (who was nominated for two Academy Awards for this film, for writing and directing) makes the ingenius choice to shift the time frame of the narrative constantly. He'll show us the future, in all of it's emotional sterility, then move us to the past, where all appears fertile. His method of telling the story builds enormous emotional impact, then places us in a deeper past, where everything is frozen. For example, by the time we see the bus accident in the middle of the film (any other film would have used it as a starting or ending point for the plot), we have already witnessed what the people of the town were like before it and after it, and as a result, the accident becomes all the more powerful and frightening. It's a masterful concept by Egoyan, and his film, easily my pick for the best film of 1997, is one that will haunt my memory for years to come.

Eyal Goldshmid
I am a fiction writer supporting myself as a government clerk for the US army. Until I can fully live off writing, I plan to milk all the luxury I can from the American taxpayer.