Search - The Sweet Hereafter (New Line Platinum Series) on DVD

A movie resonant with truth

Francois Tremblay | Montreal, QC Canada | 11/12/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I am dissapointed by movies, as a general rule. Few movies, even independent ones, dare to speak about anything but the obvious. Some movies have great acting and visual style. Others have a structure that enhance the story and themes, or explore uncommonly profound themes. It's rare that one finds all of these things together in one mind-blowing film. The Sweet Hereafter is one such mindblowing film. It is about a terrible bus accident that kills 15 children, although we only see it from afar, and halfway into the movie - the accident is a pivotal temporal point but not the focus. The focus is on the actions surrounding that accident, and what they tell us. All the while, the story is not told in chronological order, but more or less in thematical order. Past, present and future are shuffled effortlessly, because the accident is our anchor to the story. The story concerns many people, but especially one Mitchell Stephens, played by Ian Holm, as a lawyer hired by the Walkers (one of the victimized families) to start a class action lawsuit. He hops from family to family, from evidence to evidence, in increasingly manipulative attempts to rally town inhabitants to his cause, while the sordid secrets of the community threaten to derail him at every turn. A survivor, Nicole, is now handicapped and holds an important testimony. Ian Holm never had a leading role before this movie. Watching his incredible performance, I want to scream bloody murder. He's perfect. That this guy can't get a leading role is mind-bogglingly insane. The other actors, though less well-known, don't unbalance the movie at all. At first, it seems that the movie is a simple left-right conflict, with the hypocrite and conniving community on one hand, and the profiteering lawyer from the big city on the other hand. And it seems that most critics have interpreted it as such, even taking position for one or the other when no such bias is apparent in the movie. I think that says more about their statist political views than it says about the movie. The subtextual richness of this movie is stunning. Using the story of "The Pied Piper of Hamelin", it compares Stephens' cynical crusade to channel the parents' anger, as well as the independence-destroying authority of Nicole's father, to the Pied Piper story. In essence, they are leading people to more disaster, the former social and the latter psychological. Stephens' blatant use of invented narrative to coax parents into joining his case brings up the evil uses of storytelling in our society. We see Stephens' desire to lose himself in his case and the town around him, we assume because of her daughter's drug addiction, masterfully played by Iam Holm. The question of responsibility comes up repeatedly, as people's desire to find a guilty party blinds them to the fact that some things are simply accidents. Some of these themes find great resonance in today's lawsuit frenzies used to undermine capitalism. If there is one thing I find lacking in the movie, it is a lack of moral center. Nicole does provide us with a possibly moral action at the end of the movie, which I will not reveal, but the rest of the movie is very morally bleak from a rational perspective. It is not that I found it depressing, but simply morally bleak. Then again, that is what reality is like - as most people lack such moral center and desire to do good, messes like this one are common. The movie was directed by Atom Egoyan, a Canadian director. I'm not a big fan of his, and I didn't like Exotica, but he has to be good to have a movie like this in him. Perhaps the fact that he didn't create this world has something to do with it. As for the movie being Canadian, it is set in British Columbia, and the most obvious indicator of this is that there is no media circus surrounding the whole affair. But written as a fable-like story, it could be set in a great number of places. It is not the accident itself which resonates with the viewer, or the town, but the truth of the movie."

Atom Egoyan's beautiful tragedy! Masterful filmmaking!

Jeffery K. Matheus | Indianapolis, IN United States | 12/03/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"What can I say about "The Sweet Hereafter"? Well, without hyperbole, Canadian director Atom Egoyan has basically turned Russel Banks popular novel into one of the most touching and masterfully-crafted films ever made! This is the story of smalltown tragedy in British Columbia. Fourteen schoolchildren are killed in a freak school bus accident, and their families, friends, and neighbors, each devestated in their own way, tries to carry on with their lives. A manipulative laywer (played with stark intensity by Ian Holm) comes to the town to try to organize a class action lawsuit, but the lawyer is carrying some emotional baggage of his own, and Egoyan creates some beautiful plot "counterpoint" by weaving the townpeople's and the lawyers tragedies together. Egoyan takes what COULD have been fodder for another melodramatic Hollywood tearjerker, and turns it into a film of great depth and substance. Egoyan has a wonderfully lyrical sense of film composition, and he masterfully intermixes scenes from the present, with flashbacks to the past, and slowly unviels the the complex lives of his characters (including some even deeper tragedies than the bus accident!) Ever the innovator, Egoyan even manages to blend spoken poetry into the story, as Robert Browning's "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" is used as a powerfully symbolic conterpoint to the story we are seeing on screen. The whole cast is quite excellent, but young Canadian actress Sarah Polley (as the pivotal character of Nicole, a would-be rock singer and survivor of the bus crash) just about steals the show! I won't give away one of the film's most surprising plot-points (although some Amazon reviewers have already let the cat out of the bag), but I will just say that Polley's dazed facial expression near the end of the story is a beatiful piece of acting...and speaks volumes more than any big, convoluted Hollywood "comeuppance" scene could ever achieve! "The Sweet Hereafter" is a film that should not be missed by any film buff! I have seen this film at least five times now and I can attest that it only gets better with repeated vieweings, there is simply too much going on underneath the surface of the story to absorb all of it's issues on the first glance. This very "human" film is the complete antithesis of everything that is wrong with the current Hollywood scene, and with this emotionally gripping film, Atom Egoyan has cemented his place among the world's finest filmmakers!"