| Matthew Christensen |
The Sweet Hereafter plays at the Trylon Cinema on Friday, June 6th, as part of Bleak Week. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
***This essay contains spoilers***
Twelve years ago, I was living in my parents’ basement. I was 44 and living in my parents’ basement. It was not a great moment for me. I had come back to the Twin Cities after a very fulfilling four years teaching at a high school in Turkey, a place whose name once conjured up a kind of exotic idea of that country that didn’t really exist. What did exist was far richer than my limited, clichéd imaginings, a place that haunted me long into the future, and would prompt me to return two years later.
Back in Minnesota, I found a job I didn’t much want but took because it was a job, and it was within walking distance of my parents’ house. I never ended up walking the ten-minute walk, but lazily drove every day, trying to get in early enough to beat the long line of morning school buses on the road transporting students to the local high school, but not so early that I had too much sitting around time waiting to start the day. It was a low time, a time when I thought indulgence in the bleak, the melancholy, would be some kind of balm. How wrong I was. April 16, 2014, brought news of the sinking of the South Korean ferry, MV Sewol. I remember reading about the passengers, primarily made up of high school students, who were told to stay put and put on life jackets even as crew members (captain included) abandoned ship. Cellphone videos surfaced of the students nervously singing or making jokes about the Titanic, perhaps trying to allay their growing unease as the ship continued to list. I remember feeling nauseous watching these last moments videos. I remember not being able to sleep for days thinking about those 250 unfortunate students (none of whom I even knew) who died because they followed instructions. That sick feeling lingered for days and would not let go. Even now, a knot in my stomach still twists with the memory of it.
I am not certain why this tragedy affected me to the extent that it did, nor am I sure why I felt a cold detachment from the similar tragedy at the heart of Atom Egoyan’s drama, The Sweet Hereafter. The film itself, with its winter setting, feels familiar to this Midwestern boy. I can connect with the frigid, barren landscapes. I suppose the coldness this film exudes acts as a buffer in a way, allowing us to proceed through the film’s tragic narrative with stoic detachment. The Sweet Hereafter tells the story of the people of the small town of Sam Dent, British Columbia trying to cope with tragedy after a school bus slides through a guardrail and careens over the edge of a hill and onto a frozen lake. The bus breaks through the ice, injuring bus driver Dolores Driscoll (Gabrielle Rose), leaving one student, Nicole Burnell (Sarah Polley), paralyzed from the waist down, and killing 14 other school children. The film follows out-of-town lawyer Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm) as he tries to convince Dolores and the grieving families to file a class-action lawsuit against the bus company and the town itself.
In our first encounter with Mitchell, we see him stuck in a car wash while on a call with his estranged, drug-addicted daughter Zoe (Caerthan Banks). He assumes, as perhaps we do, that she has called for money to support her habit. She quickly drops her veneer of familial kindness, opting for desperate anger when Mitchell questions her motives. What viewers may remember most from this scene (apart from Mitchell’s awkward escape with his useless umbrella from the carwash, stuck in operation) is Zoe’s repeated, and pathetically childlike, use of the word “Daddy.” This word would later set up the narrative of another father-daughter pair: Nicole and her father Sam Burnell (Tom McCamus).
We see Nicole and Sam sitting together like chums as the latter encourages her in her singing career. We see her on the bus, sharing a seat with a neurodivergent student. We see her in intercut scenes babysitting two children who will also become victims of the bus accident, bedding them down for the night with a reading from The Pied Piper of Hamelin. We also witness Nicole and her father in a candlelit barn where we discover Sam’s ongoing sexual abuse of his daughter. Nicole calls Sam “Daddy,” just like Zoe does with Mitchell, creating an uncomfortable connection between the two pairs of fathers and daughters, one that asks us to consider the lasting negative impact of parents upon their children.
The visual spine of the film holding these moments together is a series of intercut aerial shots tracking the school bus as it picks up school children on the morning of the accident and drives towards its icy destination. These shots share a similar quality, both in look and feel, to the opening sequence of The Shining where the soaring camera follows the Torrence family’s VW Beetle as it drives them on a circuitous path to the Overlook Hotel. Both set a tone of impending doom, a feeling of being relentlessly driven toward a dark end. It is in these tracking shots of the bus where we meet another grieving parent before the fact: widower Billy Ansel (Bruce Greenwood), father of two of the victims, the very children we see Nicole reading to. A key witness to the accident, watching helplessly as the bus descends beneath the surface of the frozen lake, Billy would rather mourn than go through a potentially lengthy legal battle and sees Mitchell’s presence as intrusive and troublesome.
And he is not wrong.
Mitchell’s misguided attempts to rally the community and find some closure to the calamity that has frozen the town of Sam Dent result in discord. Egoyan’s ability to create tension between action and inaction suspends us as an audience. We recognize and may even understand Mitchell’s zeal for pursuing wrongful death compensation for these families. We witness, through Holm’s magnetic performance, a man somehow trying to make up for his own perceived shortcomings in relation to his daughter Zoe. We also understand Billy’s resistance. As a widower who has just lost his remaining family, and who is engaged in an affair with another parent experiencing loss as a result of the accident, he understands such an action would only further fragment the community. He articulates this in a heated argument that takes place late in the film. Billy (whose neighborly care for Nicole sets him up as a far more appropriate father figure to the young woman than Sam) rejects Sam’s unaccountable adherence to Mitchell’s plan. Nicole overhears the quarrel between the two, and it is this moment that decides for her what she will do when she is subpoenaed by Mitchell to give evidence.
Egoyan’s film does not offer the kind of satisfaction gripping legal dramas like A Few Good Men or Erin Brockovich provide. Indeed, a successful lawsuit against the bus corporation or local government most likely responsible for the accident would be a cold comfort here. This is not the story Egoyan is trying to tell. To further fuel the bleakness of the film, we see no meaningful reconciliation between Mitchell and his daughter: the unsuccessful attorney’s strained relationship with Zoe is made more complicated with another pleading phone call and a devastating revelation.
Nicole, forever a wheelchair user, is now even more dependent upon Burnell, who builds a red ramp for his daughter and redecorates her room in a pathetic attempt at some kind of apology for the unforgivable. Like the other residents of this lonely town, Nicole confronts the future, and the camera (Figure 2), with a detached and determined stoicism. While her testimony does not bring about the resolution Mitchell wants, Nicole’s subversion of justice comes as close as anything in the film to a satisfying conclusion by paving the way for a kind of healing to occur.
Egoyan’s exploration of communal tragedy extends beyond the boundaries of the tragedy itself, encompassing the pain of human experience. Perhaps it is the cold distancing of the wintery landscape and its haunted “citizens of a different town” as Nicole describes it, that allows us to experience this tragic heartbreak from a safe distance.
Edited by Finn Odum