Egoyan's Bittersweet 'Hereafter' Tackles Canadian Small-Town Tragedy

"There is no such thing as an accident," lawyer Mitchell Stevens (Ian Holm) tells prospective clients in Atom Egoyan's haunting film The Sweet Hereafter. Somebody must be to blame for the school bus accident that killed 14 children in a small Canadian town, he explains to the grieving parents whom he hopes will join his lawsuit. Fortunately, director Egoyan chooses a more complex path for his film, focusing on the capacity for survival instead of retribution.

Survivors populate the tiny hamlet of Sam Dent, devastated by the loss of their children and unable to function as a community once again. The parents respond with combinations of anger and resignation, alternately praising and condemning Stevens for his intrusion into their close-knit community. Of those involved in the crash, only two remain: the simple-minded bus driver Dolores Driscoll (Gabrielle Rose) and local teenager Nicole Burnett (Sarah Polley). The rest, including Billy Ansell (Bruce Greenwood), who witnessed his children's death, stand powerless in the face of the tragedy.

Stevens himself is a survivor. His daughter Zoe (Caerthan Banks, the daughter of Russell Banks, whose novel provided the basis for the film) is a drug addict who flaunts her pain to spite him. Although the lawsuit provides him no apparent pleasure, it is his only escape from her aggressive suffering.

Holm responds to this challenge with a solid, subtle performance. His challenge is to portray grief without obvious emotional excess. Holm, the actor best known for his supporting role in Chariots of Fire, seems resigned and defeated. His gravelly voice shows that he is a man defeated by life, merely performing his job out of custom. He only rises from his dejection when forced to show anger, the only emotion that he has left.

Anger is the tactic that Stevens uses to appeal to the bereft parents. "Let me direct your rage," he asks the parents, without providing any concrete target. Even he is unsure who to blame: the town, the school board or the bus company. It only matters to him, and many of the survivors, that someone pay, even if he or she is not truly responsible.

But Stevens cannot direct this anger, for it permeates the town of Sam Dent. The children united the town through a sense of community. Without the bond provided by the children, the dark secrets of the San Dent are revealed. The tiny town recalls the isolated communities imagined by David Lynch, where normalcy masks taboos such as incest and adultery.

Egoyan, however, does not indulge in the potentially lurid nature of this subject matter. He chronicles the tale with a dispassionate, removed manner that subordinates the disturbing incest subplot to the larger story. Egoyan appears interested in broader themes than the dark underside of small towns, a theme long exhausted. The horror of The Sweet Hereafter comes from what characters are prepared to do, rather than what they actually accomplish.

In flashback, Stevens tells a chilling story of how his infant daughter was poisoned and how he faced the prospect of cutting open her throat to save her, should she stop breathing. Although he averted the worst, Stevens knew he had the capacity to perform surgery on her himself. Egoyan presents this choice by juxtaposing the gleaming knife with the calm infant.

The other character prepared to take extreme measures is the only child to survive the crash, Nicole Burnett. She is Stevens' equal, both in character intensity and strength as an actor. As the sullen survivor Nicole, Sarah Polley gives a mesmerizing performance, confined to a wheelchair and unwilling to participate in Stevens' act of retribution. Her story is echoed in Robert Browning's poem, "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," which she tells in flashback to the children she baby-sits. Browning's poem provides a recurring metaphor for the film--one not limited to the simple comparison between the children of Hamelin and those of Sam Dent.

Polley provides the central source of energy in The Sweet Hereafter as the only character not resigned to accept her fate as the sole object of pity in the town. She acts as a balance to Egoyan's chilly sensibility, which keeps the film from descending into pathos but also makes it difficult for the viewer to fully empathize with most of the characters.

Not surprisingly, Polley's character is the only one featured outside the context of the icy Canadian winter. Everything about the film suggests barrenness. Even the entire color scheme is drab. Although it adds to the effectiveness of the imagery and remains consistent with the film's tone, this tactic further distances the viewer. Egoyan's choices are artistically correct, but often emotionally risky.

The Sweet Hereafter is certainly wellcrafted, and contains outstanding performances by Holm and Polley. But Egoyan sacrifices an emotional relation to the material in favor of an icy and remote perfection.