Written and Directed by Atom Egoyan
Based on the novel by Russell Banks
Starring Ian Holm, Bruce Greenwood, Arsinee Khanjian, Tom McCamus, Sarah Polley, Caerthan Banks, Stephanie Morgenstern, Gabrielle Rose
As reviewed by James Brundage
There is a film I keep coming back to. It is a comfort to my pain -- the shoulder of a good friend to cry on. It has helped me through extreme hardship -- been there for me with a reassuring message. When I want to blame, this film tells me to think again. This film, friends, is Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter.
The film is a tour de force of mythical storytelling. An adaptation of Russell Banks novel, it follows the events before, during, and after an accident in Sam Dent, New York. This accident is one that is as tragic as it is real: a school bus hits a patch of ice and goes off the road, killing fourteen of the twenty two passengers and leaving one of them paralyzed from the waist down.
We are all familiar with these types of accidents. In the massive world in which we live, they are everyday occurrences. Quickly forgotten, out of sight and out of mind, we never truly hear of the aftermath. After the accident, the lawyer Mitchell Stevens (Ian Holm) descends upon the town in order to begin class-action litigation.
An ambulance chaser by profession, his job is to assign blame to a blameless item and attempt to give monetary compensation to an emotional loss. However, Mitchell Stevens is not telling these people the mantras that someone is to blame in order to comfort them, nor in order to rile them up for a lawsuit. "There is no such thing as an accident" he tells people, and himself.
He sees himself as an avenger of wrongs, truly believing every
word he says because he repeats them to himself so often.
Ironically, his daughter, a drug addict with AIDS, is an accident
where no one is to blame. In the effort to console himself…
to counterbalance the out-of-control life of his own, he has
created a world where he is in control, where he is doing the
right thing and affixing blame. He claims his job is to ensure
moral integrity.
Far from being the main character, Mitchell Stevens is only a part of the myriad of stories surrounding the accident. The Burnell family is home to Nicole (Sarah Polley), a woman crippled in the accident and Sam (Tom McCamus), a father coping with a power shift as his own lies and abuse turn around and bite him. Dolores Driscoll (Gabrielle Rose) is a bus driver having to cope with self-guilt over believing she has caused a blameless accident. Billy Ansel (Bruce Greenwood) is a Vietnam vet who has now lost everything: his two twins died in the accident and his wife died from cancer a couple of years before.
The story shows the severe pain of the accident, and then the incredible need to affix blame. Whether it be people who turn away from religion due to their own inability to accept a God who would let this happen or the need to believe that an act such as Nicole wearing one of Billy Ansel's late wife's shirts brought bad luck, or the belief that the guardrail was too weak or that someone calculated the cost variance between a ten cent bolt and a million dollar out of court settlement, someone or something has to be to blame.
We are human, and as human beings blame MUST be affixed to everything. It is impossible to accept the explanation that it simply happened. The film illustrates, however, not that there actually is someone to blame but rather that the human need to affix blame is a destructive attitude. The town eviscerates itself as people begin to take sides, as greed begins to take over grief and the blame becomes a deadly cancer.
The film is hauntingly beautiful, populated with incredible images. Like Fargo and A Simple Plan, it uses a snowy landscape to portray an emotional bleakness. It is also populated with extreme symbolism and grave metaphors worthy of the greatest literary minds. With a non-linear narrative and a great gift for storytelling, writer-director Atom Egoyan manages to keep his film open to interpretation. He also juggles in the air multiple-character storylines and multi-layered narrative. Augmenting the book's simple before-and-after layering, he incorporated the Robert Browning poem "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" as a way to make a literary parallel.
For those who follow the newsgroup on which I publish all of my reviews, rec.arts.movies.reviews, you may remember that in fact I have already reviewed this movie. I did not do this film justice, and recent events made me think of it again.
Currently, we live in a world that has recently been devastated by a school shooting in Littleton, Colorado. We are now in stage two of the disaster: media and lawyer frenzy. As I type, lawyers and journalists descend upon Littleton like a plague of locusts. Copycats have begun to spring up everywhere (near my home, one school has had a bomb scare and another had two people walk in wearing black trenchcoats). Recently, a Marilyn Manson concert in Colorado was cancelled due to the fact that the two killers listened to industrial music.
Fingers are being pointed. The media is trying to fix blame to anything they can. Violent movies, the German band Rammstein, the media: there is talk of lawsuits everywhere. The computer game "Doom" is being blamed because of its violent content. The parents, as always, are getting more than their share of flak. Some people say that the killers were completely insane. Religious fanatics say that it is the devil's work. Atheists will place blame on anything in the world that they can. Plenty of us will say "fate." The ACLU will argue that it was anything other than anything that would infringe upon the bill of rights. The NRA of course claims that it is blameless, and the police shrug their shoulders. As soon as the lawyers begin their destructive reconstruction, these groups will begin to point fingers at each other.
On Honnsburger, a KDKA radio show run by a conservative Republican, a girl called in to say that the other students were to blame for them insulting the killers to no end. Honnsburger brought the girl to tears by telling her she needed therapy and by yelling at her for defending the killers. Liberal politicians are calling for more gun control. Conservative politicians yell back "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." The Right Wing is exploiting this to hype the need for censorship of music, movies, and video games. The Left Wing is saying, "You can't legislate responsibility." School boards call for metal detectors, armed guards, and higher security. Janet Reno calls for more guidance counsellors so that we can prevent such a tragedy from happenning again. Everyone is saying that this is a prime example of how our society is out of control.
Classrooms are divided by diverging opinions. Water cooler jokes have turned into water cooler political discussions. At the rate we're going, Littleton will become a hot topic in the 2000 presidential debates.
This insane need to affix blame is ripping the country apart. Our anger is taking over our grief, placing us at each other's throats instead of at funeral parlors. This is no longer a time of mourning, it is a time of yelling. The country is becoming crazier than the act that started the insanity.
For all of you, everyone reading this article, I am making the only demand that I have ever made as a critic. Go home and rent The Sweet Hereafter. View it with Littleton in mind.