December 25, 1997–January 1, 1998

movies

The Sweet Hereafter

In the season's most powerful movie, a small town comes undone after a tragic accident.

by Cindy Fuchs

Alberta Watson and Bruce Greenwood (top), Atom Egoyan and Ian Holm (bottom)

Written and directed by Atom Egoyan

A Fine Line Features release

Recommended

Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter is a revelation, disturbing and stunning. Laced through with paradoxes, it's energetic and still, confusing and crystal clear, horrific and perfect. The first film that Egoyan has adapted from another source (Russell Banks' novel), it continues to explore the themes that have occupied the Armenian, Egyptian-born, Toronto-based filmmaker in the past: obsessions and contracts, betrayal and isolation, familial passions and pathologies, and the exquisite pains of everyday life. Set in Sam Dent, British Columbia, the film explores the complex emotional aftermath of a school bus accident that kills 14 children and leaves many others injured.

The dynamics among community members are laid out with zigzaggy precision, their various emotional collisions and retreats framed by the arrival of an out-of-town lawyer, Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm), who seeks out the victims' parents in an effort to set in motion a class-action suit against whoever might be the most lucrative defendant. As he interviews potential clients, goading them to see him as the focus for their anger and despair, Stephens is revealed, through a series of carefully composed flashbacks, as a desperately unhappy and guilt-ridden father of his own drug-addicted daughter. Zoe (Caerthan Banks, daughter of Russell Banks) phones her father whenever she's in need of money and a target for her own acute rage.

In an early scene, she reaches him on his cell phone, as he sits in his car, enclosed by the whooshing and scraping of a car wash. It's a chillingly surreal encounter between parent and child, illustrating and exacerbating his own sense of confinement (literally, traveling without moving), frustration and poorly focused fury. All of this becomes clear in another car scene, a flashback to when Zoe was a baby, suffering from an allergic reaction and unable to breathe. On their way to the hospital, Zoe's face floats in the frame, with Stephens' hand poised by her throat, holding a knife, ready to perform an emergency tracheotomy if necessary. It's unnerving to see, a portrait of a parent's resolve and fear.

The interviews with the Sam Dent parents show the process by which Stephens pieces together the mundane events that led to the accident: parents recall depositing their children on the bus and waving good bye, or, even more poignantly, their delirious sense of loss at having missed such moments, suddenly fraught with unfathomable significance. Stephens is alternately pathetic and industrious, scuttling across expanses of frozen whiteness as he goes door to door, cajoling reluctant parents (like the Ottos [Arsinée Khanjian and Earl Pastko], who have lost their adopted Indian son, Bear) into letting loose an all-but-uncontrollable anger.

All these different responses eventually congeal into a weird pattern, where grief becomes rage (this is, in fact, what Stephens urges them to feel). The Walkers (Alberta Watson and Maury Chaykin) immediately fall to bickering over whether their neighbors will be morally upstanding witnesses; the Burnells (Tom McCamus and Brooke Johnson), appear to hang tight, seeking retribution for the fact that their daughter Nicole (played with extraordinary elegance by Sarah Polley) is now wheelchair-bound for life. But all of the victims are forever changed: it soon becomes clear that a lawsuit is only diversionary, a way to displace and reframe dysfunctions (including adultery and incest) that existed long before the accident brought them to the surface.

The sole holdout against the suit is Billy Ansell (the superb Bruce Greenwood), who was driving his pickup behind the bus, waving at his young son and daughter through the rear window of the bus at the very moment of the tragedy. By the time you're watching him watching it happen—the bus skidding and veering off the snowy mountain road onto a frozen lake, then sinking as the ice cracks and then gives way absolutely—you've heard enough about the event that you think you're expecting what happens. But you can't be prepared. The camera remains at a distance, stuck on the road with Billy, whose stricken face can only begin to suggest the horror of the moment.

The individual stories initially unfold separately and quite deliberately, but eventually shaping themselves into a kind of collective howl. Like Egoyan's previous movies, this one's narrative proceeds by indirection, so that you're participating in its movement—slow and strangely graceful at first, then increasingly intense. It's as if you're being sucked into a void of meaninglessness. There's terrible irony involved in this process of unpacking and reshaping events, so that lives might be imagined as something whole, despite their utter fragmentation.

The bus driver, Dolores (Gabrielle Rose, who is amazing), embodies wretched fragility, steely defensiveness and overwhelming torment all at once. As she speaks, a neck brace holding her head rigid, the camera shows the living room wall behind her, covered with photographs of the dead and injured children she calls "hers." It's not a little appalling, this mini-memorial, but Stephens' eye wanders off to the right, where Dolores' husband (David Hemblen) sits in a wheelchair, the victim of a stroke some years before, now without language and (eerily) observing his wife trying to put unspeakable memories into words.

But the point is—or will be, will always be—that memories can't be rearranged with words so that they make any emotional or moral sense. And that's where the sweet hereafter lies, in a dimension beyond language, litigation, reason, a dimension that becomes available only when Nicole, fallen into her own abyss, leads her family and neighbors to the place where they're most afraid to go, toward a truth that both dismantles and reinforces the sense that illusions and stories sustain life.