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Dancing_P [ 10.0 ]
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Masterfully crafted drama that touches on just about every theme that is important to a human being. Filled with beautifully desperate scenes and touching performances, Egoyan's film is easily the best of 1997. The scenes where Ian Holm talks to his daughter on the phone and Egoyan focuses mostly on closeups of their mouths is sheer brilliance. Absolutely beautiful film.
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Franc28 [ 9.5 ]
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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.
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| Weighted Rating | : 7.8 |
| No. Ratings | : 16 | |
| No. Reviews | : 6 | |
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