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The Sweet Hereafter
The Sweet Hereafter is not so much a film about the tragedy of death as much as it is about the tragedy of survival. How do you cope when a horrible accident has taken place that results in the loss of a loved one’s life? How do you react to what happened? Who do you blame? Is there anyone to blame? Filmmakers have been asking these questions since the beginning of cinema, and they have been answering them with various, often differing solutions. Sadly, tragedy and death are some of the easiest types of themes to suck sweet, Hollywood sentiment out of an easily-manipulated audience—movies like Cider House Rules, The Green Mile (which I admired, by the way), Patch Adams, and Pearl Harbor come immediately to mind. When these themes are tackled correctly, however, they can create some of the most enduring, captivating films about the human spirit ever made. These are movies like The Deer Hunter, To Kill a Priest, The Accidental Tourist, The Virgin Spring, and Mystic River. Fortunately, The Sweet Hereafter is ranked in the latter category. It is one of the most moving, well-pieced, and unrelentlessly honest films about coping with loss that I have ever seen. Summarizing the plot is a difficult endeavor; scenes fall out of sequence to the point that we are constantly jumping about from the past and present, sometimes by weeks, months, years, and even decades. It is film more concerned with the movement of its characters, not the coherency of the storyline. That said, most of the action takes place in a small, Canadian town where a lawyer (Ian Holm) comes searching for clients to file a lawsuit against a bus company, after a tragic accident involving a school bus that skidded off the road and plunged into a lake. All but one of the children on board were killed (the survivor is played by Sarah Polley), and everyone in the small town is deep in mourning, making it a place rich for a lawyer to attempt to place the blame on a company and collect a nice sum of money for himself. Holm is not without his own problems: His estranged daughter is addicted to drugs and continually taunts him over his cell phone from undisclosed, big cities. As he deals with her bitterness, he also comes to realize that, like all small towns, the location of his current clients have secrets that run far deeper than he ever imagined. Though the above premise is the heart of the film, this not a story told chronologically. Most of the film splices the story of this town with Holm’s narration of his own life, and even these two stories are never told in any certain order. Endings are placed at the beginning, openings are inserted in the middle, characters who are established as dead are later developed in their own scenes, from before they died. In fact, few scenes placed together are ever in the right order. Even films that have successfully used flashbacks to tell two different stories (The Godfather Part II, Rashomon, Highlander) remained consistent in keeping such scenes in chronological order, to keep their plots straight for the viewers. Here, director Atom Egoyan blends all the stories together, with no concern for keeping the plot easy to follow. We have to constantly shift gears as viewers to keep up, but then, that is the point: The Sweet Hereafter is a film about real life tragedy, and in our own lives, if we aren’t constantly shifting gears in a confused world then we’ll get lost in our own plots. This lack of an opening and an ending will probably dissatisfy some viewers. There is no climax, no falling action. There is no conventional storytelling here. The Sweet Hereafter is representational filmmaking at its purest—it simply begins and ends, and in between, it paints its pictures at its own pace with little concern for coherency or clarity. Most movies are made with characters created to support a story. The Sweet Hereafter creates a story to support its characters. What truly makes this storytelling style work is that, while the plot is always shifting, the characters in the film make changes in a perfect, three-arc fashion: They live their seemingly comfortable lives, we learn their secrets, they face their tragedy, they prevail, and they pay for their sins. How Egoyan entangles the story so much and keeps the characters right on track is a stroke of genius that would take more than this review to analyze, but much of his success is thanks to moving performances from all the actors. These are not Hollywood stock characters, but real people, with warts and all (though some warts are clearly bigger than others). Their acting emits true, raw power, so much that I had a difficult time reminding myself that I was watching performances at all. Quite simply, there is no bad performance in the film, and no one outshines another. Some might complain that by presenting a large number of characters all with as many flaws as they have here keeps the film from having any true protagonist or antagonist. To this statement, I absolutely agree—there are enough character flaws here for at least half a dozen movies, and each person is their own protagonist and antagonist. That does not mean that there is no protagonist to be found. Rather, Egoyan places himself in center stage, surrounding himself with these multiple worlds of conflicts within these characters and weaving them all together into one idea, under one clear metaphor: The story of the Pied Piper. The director makes himself his own protagonist to the film, and his use of the Pied Piper—indicating that everyone is following someone else’s enchanting music into the mountains—come a cross as a powerful, somewhat dizzying statement against placing blame and pointing fingers during times of mourning. It is Sarah Polley’s character as the lone survivor of the bus accident who actually reads the Pied Piper story to symbolize her character’s conflict—her abusive father leads her emotionally and sexually—but the metaphor extends into almost every scenario in the film: The school bus tragically leads the children into the lake; Holm’s estranged daughter manipulatively moves her father by attacking his parental merits; Holm himself leads the parents of the dead and injured children into a slippery lawsuit. These scenarios brought together within the Pied Piper metaphor packs a challenging and moral punch by leaving an emotional appeal to the viewer to consider what they allow to lead them, and to what avail. The result of these stories so magnificently weaved together is a film that is far more honest than the stories that Hollywood usually loves to tell. Here are real people, and they are really suffering. The Sweet Hereafter doesn’t need to utilize flowing tears or heavy, swelling music to create its sad effect. Egoyan simply cries for the viewer and lets them create their own music in their head. In an essence, he moves the viewer in the same way the Piper leads the enchanted children, and like the Piper, he teaches a valuable lesson about honesty and loss: Life simply is, and it exists neutrally without concern for whether or not people feel shortchanged. As a consequence, the viewer is notified that he can either fall in line or try to make the best out of a cruel, often unfair world. Cast: Alliance Communication Corporation presents a film by Fine Line Features. Written and directed by Atom Egoyan. Based on the book by Russell Banks. Rated R, for language, intense moments, nudity, and sexuality. Running time: 112 minutes. Original United States theatrical release date: October 4, 1997 (New York Film Festival). Questions? Comments? E-mail me: danel_the_tinman@hotmail.com |
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