The Sweet Hereafter (1997) * * * * A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
THE SWEET HEREAFTER is not the first film I have cried in, but certainly one of the few where I felt unashamed of what I was being invited to weep over. This is one of the best films ever made about the uncertainty of how to live in the face of death and tragedy. it is not a tearjerker that works with dumb gimmicks like a terminal disease or a cute animal; it simply states a condition, with merciless detail, and asks that we empathize. We do. It is one of the best films about "the human condition" -- what a weatherbeaten way to talk about life and death! -- since Kurosawa's IKIRU.
Somewhere in Canada, a township has suffered a terrible accident. A busload of fourteen schoolchildren went off the road, and all of them save two -- one student and the driver -- were killed. A lawyer, Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm, in easily the best performance he has ever given), comes to this town to represent the citizens in a class action suit. Maybe they can get something back -- not their children, certainly (and one of the citizens tells him, bluntly, that there's nothing Stephens can do for him unless he can raise the dead), but something is better than nothing, yes?
Stephens is himself in mourning for his own child. His daughter is not dead, but a drug addict, and in a way that's worse -- he gets to hear her voice without being able to do anything to really help her, since she's proven time and again that she's not trustable. The first time we see him, he's locked in a car wash, talking to his daughter on the cell phone. She is stuck in some unnamed city, trying to hustle him for more drug money. He mouths one nicety after another mechanically. Holm's performance is fearful and excellent, and only one of several excellent ones in this film.
The movie is not a formula legal thriller where everything hinges on some plot twist or piece of hidden evidence, but rather a story about pain that cannot be healed or dispelled with social mechanisms like lawsuits. The parents of some of the surviving children are depicted in spare, carefully assembled scenes. Some of them are hungry for any chance at redemption at all, like the parents of the adopted Indian boy (Earl Pastko and Arsinee Khanjian). Some are bitter and numb, like the father who witnessed the accident (Bruce Greenwood). Some have lost just enough to know they are not the only ones suffering, like the parents (Tom McCamus and Brooke Johnson) whose talented daughter is now confined to a wheelchair for life.
Nicole (Sarah Polley), the girl singer, is a pivotal character, but for reasons that sneak up on us gradually. At first we think her character is just going to be another meditation on soldiering on through life, no matter what we're given, but the accident has done more than cripple her -- it's starved her of a whole group of friends and peers. (The movie uses the poem "The Pied Piper" to great and tragic effect here -- a device that sounds corny, but strikes like a hammer blow when its real meaning surfaces.) She is lonely, and wounded because of that. Her performance, too, is excellent -- she's not so emotionally distant that we feel annoyed for wanting to empathize with her in the first place.
The story is drawn from a novel by Russell Banks, who had four of the main characters tell the story in separate monologues. The director, the gifted Atom Egoyan, has chosen to take the book apart and reassemble it in a way that jumps back and forth through time, but he does not use black and white vs. color or other cheap cinematographic tricks to discern the past from the present. He simply lets each scene dictate its presence in the story's whole through its emotional resonances, through what is shown and what is only implied, and the result is incredibly nuanced and rich.
One of the ways we see the movie expose itself piece by piece is in a series of scenes that take place on the flight back from the town. Here, Holm's character confesses a great deal about his daughter to a friend -- and in a scene of utterly astounding emotional power, talks about when his daughter almost died of an insect bite when she was a baby, and how he was confronted with the possibility of having to perform an emergency tracheotomy on her with a pocketknife. The way this scene is deployed and the way Ian Holm's voice ties it together and pushes it forward is masterful and heartbreaking, not the least of which because he has saved her life before and now finds himself saying about her, "I gave her all the love the father of a drug addict could spare."
The film is also startlingly lovely. I had the chance to read the script before seeing the movie, and wondered: Would this just be a movie where the characters sit around and talk to each other? No; the town is seen in elegantly composed shots that are like Wyeth paintings. Egoyan has filmed everything in a way that makes the events stand out starkly and brilliantly on the screen, and has managed to find the colors in everything he points the camera at without being flashy or distracting. The only indulgence he permits himself is in the very last shot, and by that time he's earned it.
And then there are those final scenes, in which we see the whole sad affair of the lawsuit disintegrating as a key witness apparently falsifies a testimony. Why? Since this is not a movie with a lockstep, closed-ended plot, it's almost unfair to ask a question like that. Some things cannot be healed, the movie seems to be saying, and must simply be turned away from. But some of us, sadly, cannot turn away, and are blinded as we look on.
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