| Chris Polley |
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.
I barely understood what a lawyer was as a teen in the 90s. I especially never thought I’d end up marrying one. The major reference points I had were all from TV and movies: I loyally watched The Practice even as ABC kept messing with its time slot, I taped Joel Schumacher’s A Time to Kill off HBO during a free preview week and rewatched it endlessly along with Taylor Hackford’s The Devil’s Advocate, Gregory Hoblit’s Primal Fear, and Barry Levinson’s Sleepers. These attorney-on-a-mission films enthralled my brooding sense of injustice even as they dramatized the profession to the point of fantastical superheroism, and thus, were so very clearly unreal that I never thought I’d ever meet one of these crusaders of truth and accountability at any point in my life. When my wife went to her law school orientation, I attended a session for spouses of law students, and the images of McDermott and McConaughey came flooding back. The presenter spoke of the dangers and likelihood of alcoholism, isolation, and aggression in the profession. What was she in for? What was I in for?
Of course, it all turned out fine and undramatic, but the experience opened my eyes to why exactly so many of us hunger for this popular narrative of avenging wrongdoing through process and paperwork. Not only did my mind conjure up Hollywood stars incensed about a crime or indictment, but it also reminded me of my own grief. In the face of loss, there is both a deep sadness and a fiery anger. Some hew more one way or the other, and most of us slingshot back and forth between the two. Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter is perhaps the only lawyer movie to have the artistic honesty and wherewithal to acknowledge this as the true source of so much litigation—and what it does even more importantly is both center Ian Holm’s Mitchell Stephens, Esq. and shove him off his throne of fury in favor of consideration for the community he’s problematically attempting to save. Egoyan begins his bleak tale of misbegotten vengeance—an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Russell Banks—in a brilliant but curious location known for both its cacophony and its serenity: a car wash.
“There’s something so soothing about it, it’s being cleaned, so you know something good is happening, the sound of the car wash, it’s very much like a birth canal,” Egoyan explained to IndieWire upon the film’s release in 1997.1 “It’s very wet, there’s motion, there’s water, there’s the sense of you’re in a womb moving towards light—and to have that disrupted, I find really disturbing. Suddenly to be in a place where you’re trapped in that very thing you found soothing is scary.”
It’s a strange but effective bit of table setting—one that confirms for the viewer right away that this is not your average attorney flick, nor is it your average meditation on the grieving process. One of the early indications that The Sweet Hereafter has no intention to cloyingly sugarcoat things like those aforementioned mainstream melodramas is its discomforting, exacting nonlinear structure. Smoothly but glaringly, Egoyan shifts from after to before and back to after, and then much after, an implied tragedy. An incident of some great and awful renown has occurred in a small Canadian town, and Stephens has come and gone there in search of a balm for the aggrieved, and surely, a paycheck for himself. Holm, who has shown his chops as a villain plenty of times prior, refuses to play Stephens like one, though. And Egoyan’s screenplay adaptation makes sure he’s as empathetic as he is disruptive and selfish. Ultimately, though, it’s the school bus full of children who died and their surviving friends and family members who suffer the most.
“These are individual stories of people who weren’t able to say goodbye to loved ones,” Egoyan said of the film’s affected community to Vancouver arts and culture magazine Stir in 2022,2 also tying in its theme to the COVID-19 pandemic, which was at an awkward transition point at the time. “As a dramatist you really try to remind yourself of that—not the collective grief, but to really feel these stories on an individual level is what good drama is. It’s really too easy to abstract things.”
Broken into rearranged pieces, with a broken protagonist and ensemble of different but ultimately shared kinds of brokenness, the film manages to devastate the viewer in a way very similar to how actual grief feels. It refuses to traffic in any kind of rote recovery narrative because Egoyan and his cast and crew understand that loss is magnanimous and so very rarely allows for any sort of “working through.” A demon can be exorcised; the feeling of being ripped away cannot be, well, ripped away. Just to name a few, there’s the unbearable pain of mechanic Billy Ansel (an unrecognizable, towering Bruce Greenwood) watching the deaths of his twins after already losing his wife, the tremendous survivor’s guilt of bus driver Dolores Driscoll (played with a heartbreaking softness by Gabrielle Rose), and Stephens’s constant collect phone calls from his drug-addicted daughter (a role generously given to Banks’s daughter Caerthan, perhaps the only weak link in the whole affair)—all unique despairs, none of which can find salve or solution by suing an axle manufacturer, school district, or pharmaceutical company, and definitely not in some wide-eyed, spirited closing argument in front of a judge and jury.
“The way this film so completely eschews the histrionics and catharsis of its contemporaries is most likely what offers it such an intense degree of staying power,” James Y. Lee writes for Film Obsessive.3 “Unwilling to submit to the conventions of melodrama in service of its carefully told narrative, Egoyan’s film gives off the impression of a deeply empathetic film masquerading as a cold one, with a profoundly grounded melancholy and sadness exuding itself from its seemingly more detached exterior while never making them dramatically apparent.”
This is where Egoyan’s take on The Sweet Hereafter also largely diverges from its source material. Banks’s novel is equitably distributed among the testimonies and viewpoints of the varying characters willing to wage a nebulous war on some imagined responsible party, whereas the perspectives of those unwilling to partake in the investigation are given equal weight amid panoramic snowscapes so beautifully rendered by cinematographer Paul Sarossy (who’d expertly lens another snowy Banks adaptation in Paul Schrader’s Affliction the very same year) that both provide a much-needed austerity against Holm’s nuanced but caustic portrayal of Stephens. Juxtaposed against a game supporting cast, smart deconstructionist editing, and a stirring mix of score and soundtrack from both reliably great composer Mychael Danna and Canadian rock stalwarts The Tragically Hip, the set up and takedown provided by the visual and audio components—including long passages without dialogue—cement the film as the rare screen adaptation that surpasses the already pretty great book.
“Atom sent me draft after draft, asking for comments, notes, suggestions—some of which he incorporated; some of which he ignored, quite properly,” Banks said to the Globe and Mail for a 25th anniversary retrospective.4 “For in the end this was to be Atom’s film, not mine.”
Egoyan’s razor-sharp confidence and intuition led The Sweet Hereafter to become his most acclaimed film to this day, earning himself Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay nominations at the Academy Awards as well as the prestigious Grand Prix at Cannes. Of all the incredible work happening on both sides of the camera, though, standing tall in the final act is teen actor Sarah Polley (no relation) as Nichole, a 17-year-old who survives the central tragedy only to be bound by a wheelchair and her pedophile father. Polley, of course, went on to deftly adapt and direct the Oscar-winningWomen Talking in 2022—a similarly dour but also utterly singular take on rage and trauma. How her character figures into Egoyan’s conclusion, and Polley’s tremendous and subtle performance therein, suggests that not even the young and otherwise innocent are spared when it comes to grief turned outward on a path of destruction. This makes for a rich, albeit stomach-churning, ending to a story that already tests the limits of its audience in nearly every scene prior. Stephens witnesses Nichole’s, and therefore his case’s, unraveling and is left aghast at not just her actions, and not just his, but everyone’s around him too.
“The lawyer looking to assign blame is the ‘bad guy’ seeking to destroy a community in his attempt to make a fast buck. Billy and Nichole are the ‘good guys’ for stonewalling any attempt to discover if there was any culpability—legal or otherwise—involved in the bus crash. They wish to preserve the community by simply accepting the children’s deaths and moving on,” writes attorney and researcher Timothy P. O’Neill.5 “But in the face of such tragedy, is it realistic to expect that a community will simply eschew any attempts to discover if there was human culpability involved in the deaths of its children? Is it possible—indeed, is it healthy—for a community to avoid blaming and simply ‘move on’?”
Even when said with a silver tongue, though, neither option tends to pan out in these kinds of overwhelming catastrophes. In the face of great loss, we can sue and we can sow sorrow, we can bereave and we can believe in the healing power of time, but justice will almost always elude us, not because we don’t have a movie star lawyer in our corner, but because that word—justice? It’s just a false premise upon which we eternally live and lose the lives of our loved ones.
Notes
- Kaufman, Anthony. “An interview with Atom Egoyan, director of ‘The Sweet Hereafter,’ Part II.” IndieWire. 24 November 1997. ↩︎
- Smith, Janet. “Filmmaker Atom Egoyan reflects on The Sweet Hereafter, bringing new restoration to The Cinematheque.” Stir. 29 March 2022. ↩︎
- Lee, James Y. “25 years of living in The Sweet Hereafter.” Film Obsessive. 21 November 2022. ↩︎
- Wheeler, Brad. “The untold history of The Sweet Hereafter, 25 years after its TIFF debut broke the world’s heart.” The Globe and Mail. 30 August 2022. ↩︎
- O’Neill, Timothy P. “There Will Be Blame: Misfortune and Injustice in the Sweet Hereafter.” Denver Sports & Entertainment Law Journal 5, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 19-38. ↩︎
Edited by Finn Odum