It’s hard to pull for a guy like Mitchell Stephens; he’s a lawyer with an antagonistic relationship with his daughter who is apparently trying to take advantage of a town’s grief over the loss of its children in a bus crash, to line his own pockets. But is his journey to this town part of his own search for meaning in the face of the impending loss of his daughter?
Like Stephens, most of the townspeople portrayed in The Sweet Hereafter are in obvious pain as the town tries to come to grips with the tragedy. The scenes of Stephens approaching grieving parents to convince them to join in the class action lawsuit he is mounting are heart rending. After all, who knows greater pain than one who has lost a child?
There are no pat answers to the problems this film presents: does Stephens share their pain because he too is losing a child, or just to press his advantage? Are the townspeople trying to find out what really happened or trying to make some money out of their loss? Would it have been better for both Stephens and his daughter if he had NOT saved her life as a child?
Egoyan’s use of the landscape to reflect the character’s coldness and grittiness is powerful; there are images in The Sweet Hereafter that will become permanently grafted into your consciousness. The acting is terrific: the almost unrecognizable Bruce Greenwood, the luminescent Sarah Polley, and Egoyan’s wife Arsinee Khanjian, stand out.
But The Sweet Hereafter belongs to Ian Holm, whose measured and controlled performance is moving. Egoyan’s screenplay is never false. Even its one literary contrivance, the recurring motif of the Pied Piper, is handled unobtrusively.
Finally Egoyan has made a film that has brains, heart and a soul. This is one of the great films of Canadian cinema.
