12/31/97
MOVIE REVIEW: The Sweet Hereafter
Probing the rocky aftermath of a tragedy

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer

**** (out of five)
Starring Ian Holm, Sarah Polley, Bruce Greenwood, Tom McCamus, Gabrielle Rose. A Fine Line Features release written and directed by Atom Egoyan from the novel by Russell Banks. Rated R, contains profanity, nudity, sexual situations and adult themes. Running time: 113 minutes.

Canadian director Atom Egoyan's provocative film The Sweet Hereafter could have been a dry look at a big-stakes ambulance-chasing lawyer who hopes to win a huge neglience settlement for the 14 children killed after a school bus plunges into a frozen lake.

But reworking Russell Banks's elliptical novel, loosely based on an incident in Texas and now set in snowy British Columbia, he has made an often-mesmerizing film that plays tricks with time as it probes deeply on more than one level into how people cope with life's tragedies.

The school-bus accident, which attorney Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm) sees as a potentially lucrative business deal, has splintered the outside reserve of the tiny town of Sam Dent, where the only industries seem to be a down-at-the-heels motel, a garage and acres of snow. It's the harsh, unforgiving landscape of the slopes of the Rockies that gives The Sweet Hereafter its solemn look and plays such a part in the lives here, which seem disconnected from one another. Even the loss of so many children hasn't pulled the people of Sam Dent together. They're still wary of each other.

So it's up to Stephens to rally them together so they can win a negligence suit against either the local school board or the company that built the bus. Like some old-fashioned Western movie, Mitchell is the stranger who rides into town and changes lives.

But while the people of Sam Dent suffer on one level, Mitchell is suffering, too. His estranged daughter, who has fallen in with a bad crowd and calls him from anonymous pay phones to harangue him for money or to tell him about her latest crisis, is a constant headache. Clearly he loves her, but she has pushed him to the end of his rope. He is exasperated by her antics and has all but lost hope.

Reluctantly at first, Mitchell eventually unloads the story of his tortured relationship with his daughter, Zoe (Caerthan Banks), to a sympathetic seatmate on an airplane flight, a young woman who knew Mitchell from a long time ago when he was her father's partner, a fact that he has all but forgotten. That the flight takes place two years following Mitchell's trek to Sam Dent isn't immediately clear in the film, which intercuts the two sequences so that at first they appear to be happening consecutively.

A strange group

But it's the events and the people of Sam Dent who occupy most of the screen time.

It's a strange group -- artists whose adopted Indian son is among the victims, the motel owners who hide their marital problems from Mitchell and whose misfit son was among those killed, the widowed garage owner who witnessed the horrible accident and watched helplessly as his two children drowned (depicted grimly on screen in flashback mid-film), the chatty bus driver who hasn't yet forgiven herself for the accident that took "all the children of my town," and bright teenager Nicole Burnell (Sarah Polley), whose dreams vanish with the accident when she is left in a wheelchair.

All have their secrets -- including adultery and incest -- which play a part in how they approach the accident.

And Egoyan has cleverly underlined the film's plot with metaphorical references to Robert Browning's poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin, which was not in Banks's book, but which seems a fitting tie-in. As more and more of the poem is read, in flashback, to two children who will die in the crash, it becomes more apparent how closely the story of the ancient rat catcher who spirited away all the children of an ancient village fits in with the contemporary tragedy.

Distinct personalities

Egoyan plays close attention to characterization, rare in today's movies, providing the film with distinctly original people while getting outstanding performances from his large cast.

Especially good is Holm as the lawyer. He arrives on the scene as a crusader, vowing, "I promise I will pursue and reveal who did not do his job -- who is responsible for this tragedy." But he leaves not quite able to resolve his own demons. An intimate family scene which opens the film and is later seen again in mid-picture -- a man and woman in bed with a little girl between them -- turns out to be Mitchell and his wife and infant Zoe in a more promising time . . . so we can see how dashed hopes have played such a part in his life. Holm plays Mitchell tightly wound, trying to cope with his problems by himself, without finding much success. He's a cool, yet sympathetic figure.

Excellent, too, is Polley as the traumatized young woman who finds an outlet for her grief in a surprising way. She's so circumspect about her dilemmas that her way of resolving a crisis is a total surprise.

And there is empathy in the playing of Gabrielle Rose as the bus driver whose grief can be seen in the photos of the children on her bus hanging on her wall. It's such a down-to-earth performance that it underscores the surprising reversal-of-fortune moment that occurs at the end of the film and makes it hit home harder.