Tragic bus
Finding peace in The Sweet Hereafter
by Peter Keough
THE SWEET HEREAFTER, Written and directed by Atom Egoyan based on the novel by Russell Banks.
With Ian Holm, Sarah Polley, Bruce Greenwood, Tom McCamus, Gabrielle Rose,
Arsinée Khanjian, Alberta Watson, Maury Chaykin, and Brooke Johnson. A
Fine Line Features release.
At least the victims and survivors of the Titanic had the
consolation that their fate would become an emblem of 20th-century hubris. The
bus plunge that devastates a small town in Atom Egoyan's adaptation of Russell
Banks's The Sweet Hereafter is, like all disasters, seemingly without
reason or meaning. How to transcend that void is the challenge faced by
Hereafter's flawed and suffering characters. It's a challenge Egoyan
triumphantly meets in his wrenching, nearly flawless film -- the best of his
career and the best of the year.
Told in a fluid stream-of-collective-consciousness that skips with mounting
gravity between points-of-view and from past to present to future, the film
improves on Banks's original structure of four parallel first-person
narrations. The point of view most central to the story, perhaps, is that of
Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm, alternately churlish and heartbreaking), an
ambulance-chasing claims lawyer who's come to the stricken Canadian town to put
together a class-action suit against -- somebody. "There is no such thing as an
accident," he announces confidently to one set of parents aggrieved by the
crash that killed most of the town's children. "It's up to me to ensure moral
responsibility for this thing." Most of the afflicted agree; a lawsuit will
give expression to their grief and rage and will bring closure, and not a
little cash.
But despite his demeanor, Stephens is less than secure in the
moral-responsibility department. His interviews with potential clients are
interrupted by inopportune cellular-phone calls from his daughter Zoe (Caerthan
Banks, the novelist's daughter), who's begging for money to support her drug
habit. Braided around these intrusions are a flash-forward to a plane-flight
conversation between Stephens and a friend of Zoe's. He tells an
Abraham/Isaac-like story, recounted in flashbacks, of how his then infant
daughter was bitten by a spider and he was prepared to give her an emergency
tracheotomy. Stephens's past and future griefs embrace the communal catastrophe
with fugal eloquence.
His investigation into the survivors' lives, however, brings more discord than
resolution. Among the secret scandals touched on are an affair between Billy
Ansell (Bruce Greenwood), a widower left childless when his twins died in the
bus, and Risa Walker (Alberta Watson), the mother of another victim. Unaware of
the scandal in his own family, Risa's husband, Wendell (Maury Chaykin), eases
his own pain by maligning his neighbors and fellow sufferers. Ansell proves
Stephens's staunchest adversary, ostensibly because he sees him as bringing
about the disintegration of his already beleaguered community. Perhaps, too, as
the mechanic who was the last to inspect the bus, he feels a twinge of guilt.
Hovering over these sad and squalid affairs is the fate of Nicole Burnell
(Sarah Polley, evoking mystery and gentle power with her still radiance), one
of the few surviving passengers. Paralyzed, she's a key witness to Stephens's
case, and her doting father, Sam, is eager for her to cooperate. If called on
to do so, she reminds him, she will tell all the truth -- the
implication made clear in a discrete, recurring flashback to a haunting scene
of candlelit transgression.
Nicole's witnessing to the truth, however, is not so much the recounting of
details of the accident or the uncovering of secret sins. In a repeated scene
that is one of Egoyan's most brilliant inventions, she's shown before the
accident reading Robert Browning's "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" to Billy's
twins. As the film unfolds, the verses take on uncanny irony -- the enchanted
ratcatcher, the perfidious citizens, the bewitched children never to be seen
again, the lame child who escapes. Like The Ice Storm, The Sweet
Hereafter is in part, a reminder that responsibility, not meaninglessness,
is the real horror of tragedy.
Neither Nicole nor Egoyan is so righteous as to leave it at that, however.
What resounds most in the film is not blame, grief, or loss but beauty,
terrible though it may be. Again and again Egoyan's camera takes up the route
of the doomed bus from on high. The bus snakes around the snowblasted roadway
until the unthinkable happens in a simple special-effects scene that equals all
the fury of Titanic's climax in its awe-inspiring sublimity. What is
left behind, in Nicole's case at least, is neither recrimination nor despair,
but clarity, a hereafter that, sweet or not, must be reclaimed.