Sweet Hereafter, The (1997)
The Sweet Hereafter (1997), directed by Atom Egoyan.
After a school bus accident in wintry British Columbia, a lawyer arrives and works carefully on the grieving parents, trying to build some sort of case. He has his reasons. Some of those involved won't be helping him, for reasons of their own.
Sad but rewarding, the film has a difficult structure: it jumps around the timeline without many clues for some of the scenes. We don't get to know the town or even our main characters very well and are left with questions and speculations.
A continuing theme is the Pied Piper tale, read as a bedtime story. Who took the children away? We have different candidates. In the story one lame child couldn't keep up and returns to tell the tale. We have her, too.
Great casting, with particular note of:
Ian Holm as the lawyer, arguably his first starring role. He is so deft, so crafty in his manipulations, yet driven by a secret sorrow that makes him almost mental. Donald Sutherland backed out at the last moment and I think we got the better deal.
Sarah Polley, age 18, is the surviving teenager. She'd been acting since she was a child and here shows the transition of a character from childhood to an adult able to make her own decisions, for good or ill. She gets us through a father/daughter incest plot with great delicacy and understated emotion. Neither we nor the character understand what is happening at first. Then we do.
Bruce Greenwood as the bitter widower who has now lost both children. I see him in small parts all the time and it's good when he gets better roles. With those whiskers I didn't recognize him at first. Trivia: he really is missing a tooth as shown here. Lost it in a bar fight.
The medieval chamber music score suggests the Pied Piper motif. Gentle yet magically driving.
This is one of those indie films that rewards rewatching and is "discussable" in terms of having mysteries to unwrap:
The lawyer presents a common view: that when anything bad happens, someone must pay. He doesn't know who is responsible but someone is and he will legally torture them on behalf of the families. Might it be an accident, no one's fault? "There is no such thing as an accident. The word has no meaning for me".
His secret sorrow is his drug addict daughter. Somehow he thinks getting compensation for other parents will fix his own history.
Notice how all the young women in his life -- his daughter, the teen girl, the woman on the plane -- all have similar looks, with mid-length blonde hair.
Two of them ruin his life.
Contrary to the lawyer, the Bruce Greenwood character does not expect any compensation. Things happen for no reason.
He and the teen girl are sort of spiritually mated. Nothing physical, no flirting, but consider: she babysits his kids and is a surrogate mother to them. He gives her his dead wife's clothes. After the accident they meet briefly and exchange silent, understanding glances: their lives are ruined and nothing will make it right.
See her bedroom when she comes home from the hospital, transformed into something for a fairy princess, permanent childhood. Her response: "I want a lock on the door".
Her revenge: on her father for using her and stealing her childhood before the accident, and on the lawyer for using her after. On both for treating her like an ATM, the more pathetic for the court the better.
Available on Blu-ray from Alliance. The black levels could be better and it has that ugly teal color grading.
Two commentary tracks, both pretty essential. The first is a deep conversation between the director and the author of the novel.
The second is a more personal reflection by the director alone:
He wanted to make this because of a parallel from his childhood. He had a crush on a girl who he later found to be doing father/daughter incest. She was confused as to what was happening to her, much like the character in this film.
"Incest" had become a film fad back then and he wanted to do a treatment more complicated than the standard victim-abuser plot.
The grieving "hippy" mother is played by Arsinée Khanjianmuse, wife (?) and muse to the director. They'd just had a child, making the film project even more emotionally fraught.
Although necessary to the mood of the story, he admits the non-linear time sequence is too confusing. He tried to put in clues but no one sees them.
