Director: Atom Egoyan. Cast: Ian Holm, Sarah Polley, Bruce Greenwood, Gabrielle Rose, Tom McCamus,
Alberta Watson, Caerthan Banks, Maury Chaykin, Arsinée Khanjian. Screenplay: Atom Egoyan (from the
novel by Russell Banks).
Plenty of films are hard to watch, but rarely are they so because of the sheer power of their dramatics and
the ferocity of their emotional conflicts. The Sweet Hereafter's jagged, complicated narrative structure
is nothing new in the work of writer-director Atom Egoyan, but the visceral impact that he and his impeccable cast
achieve here is rare within almost any filmmaker's career. In a small, wintry Canadian town, a schoolbus carrying
most of the local children runs off a mountain road and sinks beneath the ice. One child, played by the
incomparable Sarah Polley, survives (albeit in a wheelchair) as a witness to what happened, and it's both heart-wrenching
and a little disquieting to see how the town's adults hover around her, waiting for her testimony of what it felt like
to be on that bus, secretly wishing that their own sons or daughters had usurped her place as the sole survivor. The
larger story arc, however, concerns these aggrieved parents more directly, as they are processing—or not
processing—their loss, and how a lawyer (Ian Holm) with his own concealed tragedies arrives in town to stir up
a profitable whirlwind of blame and resentment. Egoyan's evocation of total human despair is compelling enough, but
he complicates matters significantly by introducing real moral arguments, and then he raises the bar of his ambitions
still further, daring to find in his bleak narrative (taken from Russell Banks' novel) a parable of morality and of
the possibilities of resilience. Certain things get better for these characters, and for the audience, as The Sweet
Hereafter unfolds, and certain things get worse, or look worse. It's a bracing and balanced vision of what trauma
erases from human experience and what it can't erase, and how for better or worse, there is always more to a story.
A
- Academy Award Nominations:
- Best Director: Atom Egoyan
- Best Adapted Screenplay: Atom Egoyan
- Other Awards:
- Cannes Film Festival—Grand Jury Prize