THE SWEET HEREAFTER Review: Part I
Another side story focuses — of course — on the lone man in town, Billy Ansell, who, out of principle, refuses to be part of Stevens’ suit. Played by the always engaging Bruce Greenwood, Billy is a widower involved in an adulterous affair with the owner of the local motel, Risa Walker (Alberta Watson, who has an utterly pointless nude scene that is neither erotic nor in any way telling). Risa has been cheating on her lout of a husband, Wendell (Maury Chaykin), but her liaison with Billy comes out of nowhere and serves no real purpose — save to paint the town as, surprise!, a hotbed of kinky secrets.
And that takes us to another important problem with The Sweet Hereafter: what's on screen offers little insight into the characters, something that Atom Egoyan apparently tries to compensate for with Mychael Danna's score, which is far too leading, telegraphing scenes as emotional "big moments."
On the positive side, Paul Sarossy's cinematography is superb, far above the work found in recent films such as The Motorcycle Diaries, where beautiful scenery does nothing to assist the narrative. In The Sweet Hereafter, the Canadian Rockies are not merely background frill; they're essential to the mood of the scenes, especially in the way Egoyan frames the action, e.g., he uses the weather — the fog and the natural hues of the evening — to subtly and skillfully manipulate the emotional context of a scene.
Now, going back to the issue of the film's non-linear device. Since we know what happens early on (save for a few minor details) because of Stevens’ reactions and body language, there is little drama in Nichole’s lie. Even worse, because we know of the crash, the scene showing the actual bus crash has little impact — there is nothing that allows us to feel the terror of the moment because we know it’s coming.
Worse yet, the whole focus on guilt and loss turns precious in a monologue Stevens delivers to his daughter’s best friend, about how he nearly had to save her life by cutting her throat when, as a baby, she was bitten by spiders. The whole flashback within the flashforward fails, for the lighting and dreaminess is so saccharine and so "This is the film's big moment," that I felt embarrassed at Egoyan’s cluelessness. What the filmmaker does in The Sweet Hereafter is to fetishize guilt and loss, not examine them as he claims in one of the DVD’s bonus features.
Put out by New Line Films, the Sweet Hereafter DVD has an interesting commentary track by Egoyan and Russell Banks, even though Banks provides little insight outside of cheering Egoyan on. Egoyan’s comments are hit and miss, e.g., at one point he praises an embarrassingly obvious car-wash sequence in which Stevens comes out of the shadows, even going through the trouble of explaining to the viewer that that moment represents a passage to light. (Banks shines a bit more in a featurette where he and Egoyan discuss both the book and the film at a university.)
The DVD also offers a strange feature in which each cast member answers two questions, a Charlie Rose interview segment with Egoyan, the poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin in illustrated mode, Canadian and American film trailers, and an isolated musical score.
Overall, The Sweet Hereafter is not a bad film — on a scale of 0-10, I’d rank it a passable 7; that’s still light-years from great cinema. But failure or not, there is enough skill in many aspects of the film to make me want to explore Egoyan's other works.
That said, if The Sweet Hereafter is any indication, Egoyan may be one of those filmmakers who’d do best to rely on the screenwriting skills of others, for the film's greatest flaw is its screenplay — not just in ill-wrought scenes, but also in well-written scenes poorly placed in the film's nonlinear structure. Having read some of Russell Banks' fiction, I doubt the screenplay’s flaws originated in the novel. Indeed, I found The Sweet Hereafter that rare motion picture that "gilds the lily" to the point of taking an interesting premise and killing it.
As a result of Egoyan's adaptation, The Sweet Hereafter can hardly be called profound, for a tragic subject matter does not automatically make for a deep film. Ironically, had Egoyan taken a more standard narrative route, his film would have worked better. The Sweet Hereafter may not sink to the depths of Brokeback Mountain or Crash, but nor does it rise to the heights reached by the films of Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, or Yasujiro Ozu.
© Dan Schneider
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of Mr. Schneider, and they may not reflect the views of Alt Film Guide. A version of this The Sweet Hereafter review was initially posted in September 2009.