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Sarah Polley and Ian Holm are outstanding in this heartfelt story of grief The Sweet Hereafter |
Director: Atom Egoyan
Cast: Ian Holm (Mitchell Stephens), Sarah Polley (Nicole
Burnell), Bruce Greenwood (Billy Ansel), Tom McCamus (Sam Burnell), Alberta
Watson (Risa Walker), Maury Chaykin (Wendell Walker), Gabrielle Rose (Dolores
Driscoll), Stepheanie Morgenstern (Allison O’Donnell), Caethan Banks (Zoe
Stephens), Arsinée Khanjian (Wanda Otto), Earl Pastko (Hartley Otto)
Atom Egoyan’s melancholic, wintery The Sweet Hereafter is a small-scale masterpiece about grief and
mourning and the impact a calamitous accident has on a community. Told across
three delicately interwoven timelines, it explores how the loss of a child can
affect us and how a community can be broken apart by trauma.
In a remote Canadian town, an accident to a school bus leaves
most of the town’s children killed. The only survivors are bus driver Dolores
(Gabrielle Rose) and 15-year-old Nicole Burnell (Sarah Polley) who has been
left paralysed from the waist. Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm), is a lawyer
looking to start a case against the bus company or the local authority or
anyone else he can think of who might be to blame. Stephens himself suffers
from the “loss” of his daughter, a hopeless drug addict who contacts him
intermittently for money.
Egoyan’s film has a beautiful elegiac quality, the camera
mixing intimate close-ups of tormented actors with sweeping vistas of snowy
wilderness. The film has a medieval-style pipe score, suggesting an old
medieval morality tale. Egoyan builds on this by introducing the recurring
theme of the Pied Piper throughout the film – just like Hamelin, the town has
lost all its children (bar one child). Nicole seems obviously the one remaining
child – but is she more than that? Is Dolores or the bus the pied piper? Is it
fate itself? Is Mitchell Stephens another Pied Piper, promising to solve all the
town’s problems?
Either way it’s a beautifully heartfelt look at grief, loss
and the impact it has on small communities. Everyone is aware of each other’s
business, but this town still has secrets, from affairs to suggestions of dark family
issues. But the overwhelming feeling is how grief affects us in different ways
– how it turns some to depression, some to anger, some to melancholy and some
to isolation. It also show how suspicion and resentment can start to bubble up
and rend the community – and how finger-pointing and blame can be an inevitable
consequence.
This theme is helped by the immaculate acting. There is not
a false step in the entire cast. Bruce Greenwood is wonderfully bitter and
deeply pained as the father who has lost both his children and his wife in
quick succession and wants nothing more than to forget. Alberta Watson is
lifeless and going through the motions as a mother who has lost her sole reason
for living. Arsinée Khanjian burns with undirected fury at losing her beloved
adopted son. The interplay between these and other characters is sublime,
Egoyan asking profound questions of love and trust.
Into all this appears our lawyer. In a simply superb
performance by Ian Holm, Stephens is both an ambulance chaser and also a man
who seems to need this court case to fill a void within himself. Stephens
skilfully adjusts his pitch for each member of the town he meets, adroitly recognising
and playing on the different emotions he sees to sign them up for a group
lawsuit. But how much does his daughter’s own disastrous life tie into his
mantra that “someone” is always to blame, that someone has cut corners to save
a buck? Does this same mantra help him to deal with his daughter’s failures –
that they are not his or hers but some external force?
Stephens is the classic interloper in the town – it’s easy
to see why Greenwood’s Ansell sees him as feeding off the tragedy. Holm leaves
the question brilliantly open in a wonderfully subtle performance: how much
does he care and how much does he want the money? He talks to the Ottos with
real empathy and concern, but then runs to his car in haste to get an agreement
for them to sign. Egoyan’s film asks throughout whether Stephen’s presence is,
in its way, equally damaging to the town: this Pied Piper offers to take away
their pain, but at what price? Will this crusade stop the town from putting the
dreadful event behind them?
Interweaving timelines here work very effectively – it’s a
good hour into the film before the timeline following the day of the accident finally
reaches the accident itself. By this point this accident has so dominated the
film that we have become all too familiar with the painful mundanity of grief
and the emptiness of carrying on. Egoyan shows us the accident: but not all of
it. We see it largely from Ansell’s reaction – and while we see the bus
tumbling towards the frozen lake, we never see what makes it swerve. The point
perhaps is to put us in the same position as the rest of the town: we can never
know if it was an accident, act of God, or if someone was certainly to blame.
It’s the balance between blame and moving on that this film
dwells on. The Sweet Hereafter of the film is that netherworld after loss, that
“living death” of carrying on after a loved one has left forever. Any doubt
that Stephens himself isn’t stuck in the same condition is dispelled in the
film’s third contrasting plotline. Two years later, Stephens is a on a plane
journey to collect his daughter from another treatment clinic. On the plane he
finds himself by chance sitting next to his daughter’s childhood friend. The
conversation between them slowly reveals more and more the immense loss,
emptiness and longing for family in Stephens. How much of this feeling did he
recognise in the town: and how much did his own feelings allow him to exploit
the feelings of the town?
Holm is again sublime in these sequences, his eyes little
pin holes of sadness, his tight-lipped firmness holding back waves of emotion.
In one stand-out sequence, he tells a heart-rendering monologue of a time when
his daughter as a child was bitten by a black widow spider. Rushing her to the
hospital, Stephens had to keep her calm to prevent her throat swelling up,
while simultaneously standing by to perform an emergency tracheotomy. The point
of the story for Stephens is his own fear, and the film asks: is this fear also
linked to his own regret that this was the last time he could truly keep his
daughter safe? And does he also look back on it and wonder why he saved his
daughter then so she could die of drug addiction today?
The other daughter in the film is Nicole, played with a
mature distance by Sarah Polley. Nicole, the last surviving child, slowly turns
into a pivotal figure in the film, her decisions affected by both her relationship
with her father (an unsettlingly hipsterish Tom McCamus) and perhaps her wish
to do what is best for the town. McCamus is equally good as a loving father
whose interest in his daughter is not healthy – and it’s one of many complex
questions in the film as to how far Nicole is unsettled or enamoured with his
attentions.
The Sweet Hereafter
is a beautifully made, wonderful film – perhaps one of the best you’ll see
about small town grief and pity. It may also be one of the best acted films
you’ll see – every performance is simply spot-on, heartfelt and true. It may
well be Ian Holm’s finest hour, in the most complex leading role he ever got in
his career. Egoyan’s emotional and heartfelt story has so much to tell you
about grief and mourning that it can’t help but be a sad, melancholic, but
thought-provoking and engrossing watch.
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