The Sweet Hereafter (1997)

The Sweet Hereafter is one of those films that I'd never even heard of until everyone and their brother recommended it to me. Still, it took me a while to see, but eventually climbed its way to the top of my Netflix queue, triumphantly. Although I loved it and thought it was a great film, some aspects of it were a mixed bag, and I can't figure out if that's intentional or not.

Mitchell, the lead, played by Ian Holm, is a lawyer who treks to a small Canadian town in hopes of representing its citizens in a trial after an earlier school bus accident claims many children's lives. Now, he's the main character, so it's important to establish sympathy for him, make sure the audience connects with him. While a good job is done with flashbacks to his early days as a Father and his tenuous relationship with his addict daughter, when he speaks to the people in the town, he seems very smarmy, like a typical lawyer. He uses a lot of lawyer-speak cliches and pushes them all to reveal intimate details of a horrible event in hopes that they'll get closure through money. Yet, his reflection is all done years later, if I remember correctly, so it's possible the events in the small town left him changed. I really want to see it again soon, to try and work things out in my head.

The style of the film is subtle, but very effective. Egoyan does a great job of letting most of the film speak for itself, and only punctuating key moments with stylistic flourishes. I admired the way that the film unfolds, in the future, yet flashing back to the very beginning, moving forward in time. The way that the movie is balanced between the soft, affecting moments and the very rare 'emergency' moments, I really dug.

It took me a long while to really understand the significance of the pied piper story that is read throughout the film, but it clicked at the end. Nicole's Father is a sort of pied piper, in that he controls his own daughter and, essentially I suppose, charms her. He leads her along, telling her to lie and cover these things up, and she does because of the gentle domination he has over her. Slowly, she realizes what's more important to her, and she reveals it all at the one junction where it really matters, leaving everyone else dumbfounded. It's kind of confusing, in some ways, because the film doesn't reveal instantly whose story is really true, but if you've been paying attention to the emotions running through the film, it's very obvious.