THE SWEET HEREAFTER (1997)
Direction: Atom Egoyan
Cast: Ian Holm, Sarah Polley, Bruce Greenwood, Tom McCamus, Gabrielle Rose, Alberta Watson, Caerthan Banks, Maury Chaykin
Screenplay: Atom Egoyan; from Russell Banks' novel
Ian Holm, Sarah Polley, The Sweet Hereafter
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
Some films are well crafted but lifeless. Others err by believing they can too readily make an audience care for a character just by having a traumatic situation beset him early on. Director and screenwriter Atom Egoyan's 1997 drama The Sweet Hereafter suffers from both maladies. Though not a bad film, it certainly isn't a great film, either — much less "the best film of the year" as Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan claimed.
Foremost among the film's flaws is Egoyan's disoriented narrative based on Russell Banks' novel of the same name. Since I’ve not read the book, I don't know to what degree the novel fathered the film's flaws, but let me explain how The Sweet Hereafter fails, at least when compared to truly great films. [Note: Spoilers ahead.]
The storyline follows the aftermath of a deadly 1995 school-bus crash in a remote Canadian mountain town. Big-city lawyer Mitchell Stevens (Ian Holm) pounces on the case to extract a pound of flesh for the victims. His reason, other than shyster greed, is that his daughter, Zoe (Caerthan Banks, Russell Banks' daughter), is a drug addict who has been using him emotionally to the point of causing the breakup of his marriage (or at least that is what's implied). Stevens is a small, Machiavellian man — the type Holm excels at, and he does a great job here; thus, the lawyer gets a number of the local bereaved families to crusade with him.
The film's narrative, I should add, is non-linear and herein lies a crucial problem — not that linearity is necessary; many films excel at non-linear structure. For instance, The Sweet Hereafter reminded me of Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey, released the year after and also about a father dealing with a painful outcome springing from his daughter. In Soderbergh's excellent non-linear drama, however, the narrative structure, by staying mostly with one particular character, helps the audience to empathize with a brutal Terence Stamp.
On the other hand, in The Sweet Hereafter the non-linearity gets off course because we do not stay with Stevens; the storyline jumps about to a host of characters that, after first viewing, left me wondering who they were and what relation they bore to the other characters. So, compared to The Limey, The Sweet Hereafter feels like an Afterschool Special, one whose non-linear structure ruins the dramatic core of the tale, for we already know what will happen long before it takes place on screen. More on that further on. (As an aside, The Sweet Hereafter also reminded me of Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm, another well-crafted effort plagued by script and character development problems.)
Another major problem in The Sweet Hereafter is the unnecessary complication of an incestuous relationship. One of the older girls aboard the bus, Nichole Burnell (Sarah Polley, who is excellent with what little she is given), may be paralyzed for life following the accident; she has also been having an affair with her long-haired dad, Sam (Tom McCamus), who nurtures her American Idol-like fantasies of becoming a rock star. Their relationship leads to the film's final outcome, wherein the girl ultimately destroys Stevens’ case by blaming the school-bus driver, Dolores Driscoll (Gabrielle Rose), for speeding on an icy mountain road.
Egoyan wants us to believe — via the theme music and lighting — that Nichole's lie is somehow a good thing, for it helps prevent her father from getting a large settlement from Stevens' class-action lawsuit. But in fact, all the lie does is make Nichole come across as bad as the rest of the greedy townsfolk, for she blames an innocent woman for the accident.
Compounding matters, just as the force-fed tale of Stevens and his daughter elicits no empathy, Nichole's incestuous relationship with her father failed to move this viewer. This is partly because the girl clearly engages in the fantasy element of the "romance," in addition to the fact that the two characters are so small a part of the tale that one has little chance to understand either the father’s motivations or the daughter’s receptivity to it (an attitude that feels forced).
In fact, I wondered if Nichole kyboshes the potential settlement for the town not because her father had a sexual relationship with her and refuses to own up to it, but because she is jealous of the time he is spending away from her while slavering over his potential fortune.
Nichole is also hamhandedly used as a symbol when she recites Robert Browning's poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin. The idea of lost children is so obvious in The Sweet Hereafter that the reason Egoyan adds this touch is bewildering, save that he bizarrely felt the loss wasn't evident enough. That begs the question of just how confident Egoyan was in Banks' original work, for the poem is only one of many elements in the film that are supposed to be significantly different from the book.
i went and watched the sweet hereafter and i really liked it. i did a post on it on my blog. can you tell me what you think? its only the third review i have done online.
plum
I like your review. I wonder though, if this film is as bad as you say. I usually agree with The reviews at Cannes and Sarah Polley chooses incredible work. Of course, the fact that your review disses the film makes me want to see it and decide for myself. So in a way, it's a good thing because it gets me thinking and excited about film.
Plum