In a small Canadian town one winter morning, a school bus veers off the road and plunges into a lake, killing fourteen children. Hotshot city lawyer Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm) travels to this isolated settlement in hopes of persuading the children's parents into a lawsuit. Despite the driver's claim that she just hit an icy patch on the road, he assures them that accidents cannot just happen: there must have been a mistake, a mechanical failure, a faulty bolt. There must be somebody to sue. Someone must pay for what has happened to their children. As he coaxes and cajoles, drawing out the story of the accident from the evasive townspeople, the powerful undercurrents that flow through this outwardly quiet town rise slowly to the surface.
The Sweet Hereafter is a strange, unsettling film, with a hypnotic power that reminded me of Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock. Adapted from a novel by Russell Banks, its characters are, as in Atom Egoyan's earlier films, people on society's margins. True, they share a strong sense of community, but it is an isolated, secretive community, a town in the middle of nowhere, turned in on itself and hostile to outsiders. Each household hides its own secrets: everywhere words are left unspoken, the real meaning of what is being said conveyed in the look in an eye, a head turned away, a raised eyebrow.
Three timeframes are woven together: the town before the accident, ending with the accident itself; the aftermath as Stephens finds it; and a plane journey Stephens takes a couple of years later. This is confusing at first, as the different periods are cut together with no delineation, but it becomes extremely effective. We do not see the accident itself until the middle of the film, instead getting a blow-by-blow account of that final doomed journey as the townsfolk answer Mitchell's questions. This delay makes it all the more shocking when it finally happens. It is beautifully filmed: we see the accident from the point of view of Billy, a father of two children on the bus, as he stands on the roadside helplessly watching it sink into the lake, disappearing slowly into the empty white landscape. There is silence save for the bitter, booming sound of the ice cracking: the scene is presented without comment from the director.
Slowly we are introduced to the inhabitants. Wendell (Maury Chaykin) and his wife Risa run the Bide-a-Wile Motel. Wendell is overbearing and dismissive of Risa, who seems the stereotypical downtrodden, cowed housewife, shabby and servile. Soon, however, we learn that Risa has secrets of her own: she is having an affair with Billy (Bruce Greenwood), and we see another side of her, feisty, playful, and self-willed. She and Wendell have lost a son, Sean, who had learning difficulties and cried every day as she put him on the school bus.
Billy is a widower, a reserved, lonely man. His twin children, Mason and Jessica, always sit in the back of the bus and wave to their daddy, who drives behind the bus every day. Only he sees the accident happen, and he refuses to talk to Mitchell. He has learned through his wife's death that terrible things happen to innocent people for no reason. Accidents do just happen. His wife died, and now his children have died, and that is just that. He and Risa argue about this the last time they meet: she has a great need to believe there is someone to blame for what happened to her son, that a particular cause, a reason, can be identified. She clutches at anything: Billy gave away his dead wife's clothes to his baby-sitter, who was on the bus that day wearing one of the dead woman's jumpers, dooming them all. Or maybe there really was a faulty bolt. Billy, who serviced the bus before the crash, knows there was nothing wrong with it. She cannot accept that.
The Ottos are the town's hippie couple, who moved out to the town from the big city and make a living from arts and crafts. Their adopted son, Bear, was also killed in the crash, and their happy, downsized lives are shattered. When Mitchell goes to see them he has to work hard to persuade them to join the lawsuit: the husband is quietly resigned to what has happened, the wife distraught. Like many of the townsfolk, both instinctively reject the idea of suing for compensation, and Mitchell wins them over by telling them that he is not doing this for the *money* <feigned horror>. No, he is doing it to make the bus manufacturers realize that they cannot cut costs by compromising on safety. He is doing it to make sure this tragedy doesn't happen to another family.
Dolores, the bus driver, is a terrific character and beautifully acted, maternal and dignified. Wearing a neck brace, arm splinted, she tells Mitchell the story of the bus's last journey. The kids are her family: she has photos of them all hanging on her walls. She talks about them in the present tense, knows all their individualities and quirks, everyone's routines and habits. Sean always cried and clung to his mother; the Ottos were the only couple who waited with their child for the bus. She believes the crash was an accident, nothing more. She lost control of the bus when it hit an icy patch at her usual 50 mph. In the scenes closing the movie, two years later, Mitchell is standing at the airport taxi rank when he sees Dolores herding tourists onto a coach. Their eyes meet, and they look at each other for a long moment before she turns away and gets into the driver's seat. Like so many other scenes in the movie, nothing and everything is said.
Holding the film together is Nicole (Sarah Polley), Billy's baby-sitter, a teenager with dreams of becoming a rock star. (The actress really has a beautiful voice: she sings over the closing credits). She is a model child, responsible, affectionate, talented. We slowly learn, however, that in this town of lonely, wounded people, she is the most damaged of all. Her father, with whom she seems to have a perfect relationship, is sexually abusing her. The accident leaves her paralysed from the waist down and seems to open her eyes to what he is doing to her - her every word to him afterwards is loaded with meaning, with hurt; her eyes glare at him, full of bitterness. She hears him arguing with Billy about the lawsuit: he is determined to pursue it, tells Billy how badly the money is needed to pay for her hospital bills. In her deposition about the accident, she effectively scuppers the lawsuit by lying about what happened. As she does this she watches her father sitting in the corner. He knows she is lying to destroy him, to wound, to punish: she is taking back what he took from her, and doing it viciously.
And finally, there is Mitchell himself. At first he seems to be just another ambulance-chaser - he works on a no foal no fee basis, but if they are successful he will take a whopping one-third of the amount they are awarded. He is manipulative, devious - he knows exactly what to say to each character to get them to agree to the suit. Only Billy is unmoved. We learn, however, that Mitchell has his own problems and motivations. His daughter, Zoë, is a disaster: a heroin addict, in and out of rehab. Eventually she is diagnosed HIV positive. Their only conversations occur when she calls him looking for money: he can hardly speak to her, is monosyllabic. He finally manages to tell her he loves her, will always be there to take care of her, but she has hung up and he is talking into a dead line. On the plane journey he finds himself seated next to an old schoolfriend of hers, and he reluctantly opens up to her about Zoë, eventually falling into a long monologue telling the story of how once, when she was a very small child, she almost died from a spider bite. As they drove to casualty he held a knife to her throat, ready to cut into her windpipe should her throat swell up and close. It is the dual role, of protector and destroyer, that will characterize his relationship with Zoë right through their lives. The camera stays on the calm, innocent face of the young Zoë; we don't see the face of the grown-up Zoë, merely catching glimpses through phone-box plexiglas. Mitchell refuses to see her as she is now, what that lovely child grew up into. In a confrontation with Billy he says he has lost a child too, that all the world's children are lost, to drugs, to violence, to the destructive culture of the late twentieth century. He is a man filled with rage. Not mere ambulance-chasing, this lawsuit is his way of fighting back.
The direction throughout the movie is very much essential Egoyan. Although the distance maintained between characters and audience is not as great as in previous films, it is still present. We are watching these people's lives rather than involved in them. He is a director obsessed with alienation and isolation, and it shows in every shot. In the scene where we learn Nicole is being abused, the camera passes slowly over stacked bales of hay, catches Nicole and her father kissing, surrounded by candles, and passes on. There is no lingering, no close-up: we are shown this almost by-the-way, and left to make of it what we will. Egoyan will not tell us anything: he simply watches with his camera, and we see what he sees. It is extraordinarily effective in this film, forcing us to think about the characters and to make our own judgments. After the dumbed-down spoonfeeding of most of the films we see today, it is very, very refreshing.
The film's power lies in its performances. Ian Holm (who got the role when Donald Sutherland pulled out ) is outstanding as Mitchell. His character is so real, so lonely and disillusioned; the long scene where he tells the story of Zoe as a little girl is one of the most moving I have seen in a long time, all the more so because the character is so reserved, so restrained: to see this facade of strength breaking down is deeply affecting. Bruce Greenwood, who featured in Egoyan's Exotica, is also terrific. He plays Billy with just the right balance, a decent man who is reserved but feels things deeply, resigned to the tragedy in his life but angry enough to threaten to beat Mitchell to a pulp if he carries on with the suit. Sarah Polley's performance as Nicole - fragile, wounded but ultimately a survivor - is very strong. Her face is so expressive. Her eyes seem drawn to her father's, every glance at him is loaded with the secret between them. In fact, there are no weak links in the cast. Every actor is terrific, making the characters real and interesting, even those we only meet briefly.
The thread running throughout the movie is the Pied Piper of Hamelin. While babysitting, Nicole reads the story aloud to Billy's children, and at key moments of the film we hear her read it in voiceover. As the film ends she is the child left behind, the little boy who was lame and could not keep up with his playmates. She is left in this strange new world, with Billy and Risa and Mitchell and all those who have lost children. Egoyan shows us in this film what Hamelin must have been like after the piper's revenge. It is a haunted and haunting place.
(c) Jennifer Mellerick 1999