The Sweet Hereafter (1997)

Some things I liked some I did not.

People are voting emotionally.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

A slow burner that will leave you emotionally devastated by the time it ends. This reminded me a lot of Manchester by the sea. The small town, the accident, the grief. If you loved Manchester, you're surely going to love this. Or vice versa. I think. Maybe. Who knows.

Okay, so Egoyan has faded from view it seems, but for a while as he really was something. Exotica was powerful in exemplifying his paradigm. A narrator trapped in hurt that he constantly relives as performance, the entrapment as memory, the narrative of vaguely dreamlike connections as self. More than just some drama out there, it was a coda penetrating into something of the very process that gives rise to the ruminating mind; self. He extends it here.Once more a narrator who remains trapped in impotent hurt - a lawyer whose daughter has strayed in drugs - who is now approaching people much like him, heartbroken by childloss, to convince them of the need to find someone to punish and hold responsible. A larger view through this man. About us, unable to come to terms with the fact that life is transient and will sometimes break down for no reason. And how this freezes love, makes rigid our ability to remain supple in the face of mishap - and if this isn't the definition of love, I know of no other - and turns it into incessant ego.Egoyan is an intelligent mind in sketching his paradigm and again in how he pursues resolutions. Parents having been convinced by this bitter man (who is a storyteller working to construct a legal story that justifies) to throw their hurt outwards, turn it into recrimination, it's the surviving daughter who breaks the cycle of suffering for all involved. How she does it, again referencing narratives, is by fabricating a memory, fiction that requires a performance. It's not the truth of course, but it's what needs to be done so that fictions can be chucked away and simple acceptance can begin the work of mending. Yes, he can be obvious in spots and parallels, more so here than Exotica. He can be as simply lyrical as Kieslowski, as complexly layered as Medem. But seen overall, it's the larger awareness of life as flow that goes through many veils that makes this worthwhile. On these veils are seen the shapes of bygone life, mind itself as it wonders. He pursues this mind with an eye that is marvelously freed from the here and now to surge forward and back in search. This effort in film is far from novel, it goes back to Tarkovsky at least, but it's tuned to the same purpose; how to see with an eye that remains supple in the face of reality.And we can venture even further out to offer this view about the world that gives rise to this work. Egoyan can trace a past life for himself in a corner of that bygone world that centuries ago was overran by invaders from the steppe. He must be acutely aware of a past that is shrouded in ruin, the need to placate ghosts of memory. This is a world I happen to share with him, first Armenia, then Constantinople and all the way up to the Danube, that was wrecked in its physical reality, severed from it in so many ways, and a deep part of it has taken flight in dreams and memory, which is the subject of both this and his previous film.So is it any wonder that he draws fresh water from Tarkovsky's spring? It's a spring that both Parajanov, another Armenian, and Kusturica later would draw from, and it goes back in time in a deep way. Something to keep in mind while viewing him.

Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm) is a lawyer struggling with his drug addicted daughter. He's trying to convince various parents to sue the town. They lost their children when the school bus driven by Dolores Driscoll (Gabrielle Rose) gets into an accident on a snow covered road. The town is the only one with deep pockets and Mitchell will say anything to get them to sue. Nicole Burnell (Sarah Polley) is a survivor who was sexually corrupted by her father.This movie meanders a lot. There are long flashbacks of not only the bus ride and crash but also some of the life before that day. It has an ethereal dreamlike quality about it. It has the sad moody devastation. It doesn't make it a compelling watch unless seeing the saddest people in the world is fun for you.

***SPOILERS*** We know right from the start where the film " The Sweet Hereafter" is headed in ambulance or school bus chasing shyster lawyer Mitchell Stevens, Ian Holm, on his way to this snowy little town in British Columbia Canada. Stevens is trying to get the people involved in a fatal school bus accident to help him start a class action suite against the bus company the bus driver as well as the town, Sam Dent, in what happened there. We also see that Stevens has problems of his own in that his teenage daughter Zoe,Caerthan Banks, is heavily into the drug scene and is later in the film found to be HIV or AIDS positive because of her non-stop drug use. It soon becomes obvious that Stevens in having his life screwed up, his wife also walked out on him, wants to help others like the school bus survivors and their families more then making any money for his services. It doesn't take to long for Stevens to find out that his services are no longer needed in that by him suing everyone or every thing in sight he's in fact opening up wounds in the community that have just started to begin healing. Wounds far more hurtful then what the people in Sam Dent have already suffered which in fact they were compensated for by the school bus company and despite it not being found responsible, for any shabby work on the road and guardrail,town.At first we dislike Stevens in his obsessive attempt to get the people in town to help him with his class action suit that many don't want to pursue. But later he turns out to be a victim of his own self righteousness in seeing he's going to hurt a lot of Innocent people with his suite who suffered , by surviving, even more then the victims whom he's to represent. One of them is the school bus driver Dorloes Driscoll, Gabriella Rose, who did everything to avoid her bus from skidding into a frozen lake and now has to live with the 14 children who ended up drowning in it on her conscience. There's also 15 year old Nicole Burnell, Sarah Polley, who survived the accident but ended up like the little boy in the story of "The Pide Piper of Hamlin", a favorite of hers, crippled and prevented from entering the land of "Good & Plenty" that the piper was taking the children of Hamlin to.***SPOILERS*** Slow moving but extremely heart wrenching film that has no happy ending which in fact makes it one cut above the usual Hollywood schmaltz were used to watching about the subject matter that it presents to us. A lot like the movie released the year before in 1996 "Before and After" the film "The Sweet Hereafter" shows us how one survives a tragedy like losing a child with both dignity as well as grace instead of vengeance and self-guilt. Besides Nicole the film centers around Billy Hansel, Bruce Greenwood, the mechanic who serviced the school bus and knew that there was nothing wrong with it. Billy also lost his two children who were on the school bus that he witnessed, by driving behind it, crashing into the lake drowning them and their dozen or so classmate. For all the suffering that Billy and the rest of the people in Sam Dent went through he didn't want some shyster lawyer to make, excuse the pun, a killing off it!***MAJOR SPOILER** In the end Stevens also lost a child, his daughter Zoe, through drug abuse and realized the only thing he can do now is try to put that tragic loss behind him like Billy as well as the crippled Nicole were doing and go on with his shattered life. It was Nicole who in her trying to put an end to the lawsuit that Stevens was pushing ended the whole affair by making up a preposterous story about the event,in Nicole being a star whiteness, that had it thrown out of court. Which allowed the healing process that Stevens tried to disrupt to continue and thus make things better for her as well as Mitchell Stevens and everyone else involved.