The Sweet Hereafter - Atom Egoyan
5 January 2008If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Against the lovely and sweeping backdrop of a wintry landscape, where the almost infinite white of snow blanketed the sparse surface of the mountains, a terrible tragedy happened when a student filled bus suddenly lost its bearing, skidded and plunged bringing all, except two, to their icy grave. This has largely changed the small and sleepy Canadian town of Sam Dent.
A crafty lawyer, Mitchell Stephens, who one day just pops into town, manages to convince almost all the affected families that they can do something about it. That they can direct their rage and suffering and possibly be compensated for it, of which he keeps 1/3 if successful, by filing a class suit for negligence, against the school board, the manufacturer of the bus or who anyone they can blame.
The Sweet Hereafter, an adaption from a novel by Russel Banks explores the town’s deep grief and suffering and how people, sometimes, in their desperation fail to see the opportunistic manipulations of others. This, without presenting it as tear jerking or too melodramatic. However, it’s confusing as the storyline is non-linear. It goes to and fro. Forward and back. But I guess it’s not used as a gimmick but a carefully planned device to heighten the viewer’s anticipation. And rightly so, as the storyline starts to converge and the pieces are finally coming into place.
It should be noted that there are two parallel stories. First, about the different families of the town. Their flaws and characters, the grief of their loss, their agreement of the class suit and the legal deposition that invalidated it as given by the surviving student, who has her own demons brought about by an incestuous relationship with her father. Egoyan also invoked from time to time the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, which is another parallel.
Second, the lawyer’s own grief of losing his daughter to drugs and the estrangement that is now keeping them apart. But despite the daughter’s incessant calls and blandishment for money, he still loves her very much. This angle calls to question Stephen’s real motives of instigating a class suit. Did he do it more for profit or, as also an aggrieved father, saw himself in the families suffering the loss of their children?
With equally topnotch performance by its cast especially the lead, Ian Holm as the lawyer and Sarah Polley as Nicole Burnelle, the surviving student. This is just one brilliant film that you would not forget.
After all that has happened with the lives of the families in the town, life just has to move on, learn from and live with the past into the sweet hereafter.
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