The Sweet Hereafter
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| The Sweet Hereafter | |
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 The Sweet Hereafter poster |
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| Directed by | Atom Egoyan |
| Produced by | Atom Egoyan Camelia Frieberg |
| Written by | Russell Banks (novel) Atom Egoyan |
| Starring | Ian Holm Sarah Polley Bruce Greenwood |
| Release date(s) | May 14, 1997 (Cannes Film Festival) |
| Running time | 112 min. |
| Language | English |
| IMDb profile | |
The Sweet Hereafter is a novel (1991) written by U.S. author Russell Banks; and an award-winning film (1997) by Canadian director Atom Egoyan, who also wrote the screenplay.
Banks's novel is a multiple first person narrative depicting life in a small town in Upstate New York in the wake of a terrible school bus accident in which numerous local children are killed. Hardly able to cope with the loss, their grieving parents are approached by a slick city lawyer who wants them to sue for damages. At first the parents are reluctant to do so, but eventually they are persuaded by the lawyer that filing a class action lawsuit would ease their minds and also be the right thing to do.
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[edit] Plot
As most of the children are dead, the case now depends on the few surviving witnesses to say the right things in court. In particular, it is 15 year-old Nichole Burnell, who was sitting at the front of the bus and is now paralysed from the waist down, whose deposition is all-important. However, she unexpectedly accuses Dolores Driscoll, the driver, of speeding and thus causing the accident. When she does so, all hopes of ever receiving money are thwarted. All the people involved know that Nichole is lying but cannot do anything about it. Only her father knows why, but he is unable to publicly reveal his daughter's motives.
Both the novel and the film are about capturing the atmosphere in a small town suddenly shaken by catastrophe. Fathers take to drinking, secret affairs are abruptly ended, whole families move away. Only the reader/viewer knows that Mitchell Stephens, the lawyer, is himself a troubled man who has effectively lost his own child—his estranged, drug-addicted daughter informs him over the phone that she has just tested HIV positive.
[edit] Themes in the book and movie
There is a somewhat different emotional focus between the book and the movie. The book deals more centrally with the futile attempt to find meaning in a tragic event and in the emptiness of the aftermath, with Dolores serving as the sacrificial scapegoat the town requires in order to heal. This theme is especially evident in the character of the lawyer Mitchell Stephens, who is driven by a fervent need to find someone to blame, to keep the inevitable realization from sinking in that it is all senseless—pain and tragedy sometimes simply happen without reason.
In the movie, Nichole is seen reading The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning to children who later die in the accident. In that story, the Pied Piper leads all the children away, never to return, after their parents refuse to honor their debt to him. Though Egoyan's screenplay is not necessarily saying that the parents are responsible for the deaths of their children in the bus accident, when juxtaposed with the incidents of incest and adultery among the townspeople, the Pied Piper theme perhaps introduces a moral judgment against them not evident in the book—that the accident is an implied punishment for their sins.
In the Pied Piper, there is a crippled child who is unable to follow the Piper's song, and so he is left behind in a now-childless town, forever wishing he could have gone with the other children. The paralyzed survivor, Nichole, is clearly identified with this child in the movie, shifting away from her motivation in the book in which she is primarily acting out of anger against her incestuous father. Instead in the movie she has mixed feeling about the accident - on the one hand it has crippled her and killed her friends, on the other hand it has given her power over her father.
The Pied Piper theme is further enhanced through a haunting score by Mychael Danna, which is heavily influenced by Medieval and Renaissance music with frequent appearances of a flute.
The song Courage (for Hugh MacLennan) by The Tragically Hip serves as the theme song used in the soundtrack.
[edit] Cast
- Ian Holm - Mitchell Stephens (lawyer)
- Sarah Polley - Nichole Burnell (victim)
- Tom McCamus - Sam Burnell (father)
- Alberta Watson - Risa Walker (parent)
- Bruce Greenwood - Billy Ansel (parent)
- Gabrielle Rose - Dolores Driscoll (bus driver)
- Arsinée Khanjian - Wanda Otto (parent)
- Mychael Danna - Live band harmonium player (uncredited)
[edit] Links to other Russell Banks novels
The town of Sam Dent is used as the background for several other Russell Banks novels and collections of short stories.
- Rule of the Bone - Nichole Burnell's younger brothers are living in the derelict school bus now parked in the middle of a field.
[edit] Trivia
- The movie was filmed in four locations: Merritt, British Columbia, Spences Bridge, British Columbia, Stouffville, Ontario, and Toronto, Ontario[1]
[edit] References
- ^ Filming Locations for The Sweet Hereafter. The Internet Movie Database (IMDB). Retrieved on 2007-01-15.
