The Sweet Hereafter
Written and directed by Atom Egoyan
Fine Line Features
1997
Rating:


"The Sweet Hereafter" manages to find the elusive beauty in loss. Paradoxically serene and shattering, simple and profound, director Atom Egoyan describes with deft subtlety the sorrow and enduring hope of a community when tragedy threatens to consume it.

On a motionless day in the snow-covered town of Sam Dent, 14 children die in a bus accident when the driver (Gabrielle Rose) crashes into a frozen lake. Ambulance-chasing lawyer Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm) is trapped in the local car wash when the families learn the news. Stephens quickly inserts himself into the community, selecting the town's most honorable citizens for a class-action suit and earning their reluctant trust. "I will represent you only in your anger, not your grief," he says. "Let me direct your rage."

Though he never reveals it to his clients, Stephens knows what it's like to lose a child. His daughter is alive, but drugs have stolen her away from him. She occasionally calls him when she runs out of money, but he puts that to an end when he's forced to admit that "enough rage and hopelessness and your love turns to steaming piss."

Stephens' investigation into the accident unearths some of the secrets buried beneath Sam Dent's idyllic surface. Nicole Burnell (Sarah Polley), one of the crash's few survivors, begins to realize her incestuous relationship with her father (Tom McCamus) is not as loving as she once believed, and the affair between unhappily married Risa Walker (Alberta Watson) and widower Billy Ansell (Bruce Greenwood) loses its passion once Billy helplessly watches his children drown. Robert Browning's poem "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" becomes a recurrent motif, reflecting the loss of Sam Dent's children and suggesting that perhaps the town's elders are being punished, but there's no rhyme or reason for the tragedy that occurred.

Egoyan fluidly moves his film backward and forward through time, showing parents as they kiss their children's smiling faces before they go to school, then cuts to them in their inconsolable remorse. When Egoyan finally shows the bus slowly sink beneath the ice, it feels as if it causes a small crack in the fabric of reality. The loss of the people of Sam Dent has become our loss, and it tears apart the soul.

The poetic lyricism of the imagery and poignant performances gradually draw the viewer into the shattered psyches of Sam Dent and the lawyer hell-bent on making someone pay. Holm is magnificent as a broken man seeking redemption for his failures as a father, but it's Polley's heartbreaking performance that becomes the film's emotional core. Her Nicole, despite feeling Sam Dent's devastation more acutely than anyone, is the town's sole chance for salvation.

Once the director completes his wondrous mosaic, the film has a near cathartic effect. It's impossible to watch without feeling transformed in some way, without coming to believe that, beyond grief and loss, there is the sweet hereafter.

Posted Saturday, April 16, 2005

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/sweet.hereafter