De beaux lendemains

I've seen this film twice now, and had the same reaction both times, so it's not out of gut reaction that I label "The Sweet Hereafer" an odious piece of simple-minded garbage.

The central idea (a school bus crash) has such intrinsic emotional repercussions that I can see how most viewers are washed away in grief enough to not notice the emptiness of the conceit built around it.

As an intruding lawyer, Ian Holm is asked to give a performance of staggeringly self-conscious falseness in which his every word, movement and breath is meant to project "SOMETHING IMPORTANT". His episodic encounters with the people of the community in which the accident took place only reveals Egoyan's total condescension toward life's "little people", presenting them as simpletons who, gosh darn it, love their children and each other and turn their noses up at anything so disgusting as a dollar bill.

In a failed attempt to make at least one character two-dimensional, a subplot is slopped on about the lawyer losing touch with his own child, the most ridiculous drug-addicted banshee every put on film.

Toss in heavy-handed allegories, heart-tugging muzak and trite conclusions, and what have you got? An award-winning "masterpiece", to hear most people talk. More likely they woke up the next morning, remembered something about angelic children heading for their final bus ride, and forgot the manipulative banality of the rest.

View the first episode of Krzysztof Kieslowski's 1988 "Decalogue", which covers similar thematic ground and, in 50 short minutes, accomplishes worlds more.

3 out of 10 for nice work by actors Bruce Greenwood and Sarah Polley.

I had to laugh or else I'd cry – and not because a bus full of school children died.

I honestly can't imagine anyone being moved by this film. It is too distant to be involving, too vague to be meaningful, too slow to be engaging and too cold to be emotional. But boy, oh boy, is it funny.

The dialogue is so odd and unnatural that it becomes comical. Note the stagy way in which the detective's daughter talks. `Welcome to hard times, DADDY', `I like it when you don't believe me DADDY.' Come on, playing a drug addict is easy – just watch Courtney Love and imitate. Zoe doesn't sound drugged out but she must be because she always calls from a payphone where police sirens blast in the background. And Zoe comes off well in comparison to the unintentionally hilarious stroke victim and the Otto's who put their heads together, dry-eyed and sniffle, expecting us to believe that they are crying over their long lost son named, Bear, of all things.

Bravo to the generic and lifeless Sarah Polley who musters a tiny ounce of oomph to deliver `the big lie' at the end – you know, the one she said she would NEVER tell. She even attempts to glare at her father and later; if you look really close, it's the beginnings of a grin.

How ridiculous is the scene where Ian Holm recounts a spider bite story that goes absolutely NOWHERE? Why doesn't he remember Alison's father? Why does he get stuck in a CAR WASH? What is wrong with this guy?

And why is creepy Billy a saint for trying to convince Nicole's father not to sue? This anti-sue-happy town sure is unrealistic. Oh, they're Canadian. Thank explains it. Sure Ian Holm's acting is bad but does he really deserve the town's wrath for trying to gain a buck?

There is a really cheesy time transition scene, which illustrates how confused director Atom Egoyan is. He thinks the audience needs to be hand held in order to comprehend the passing of time and yet he fails to explain anything else in this perplexing tale with similar clarity.

Would people really behave the way these people do and what does it all mean anyway? Detective Stephens says that our children are all lost to us. The Pied Piper story echoes similar sentiments. Some school kids are dead while others grow up to become drug addicts and are as good as gone. One strange girl lives and because she tells a lie she is now, apparently, more pure than anyone else in town and well, that's it.

It is always wise to heed the immortal words of Radiohead – don't get sentimental, it always ends up drivel. The Sweet Hereafter doesn't even have enough power to illicit the feelings that sentimentality requires. It is the worst kind of drivel -the kind that attempts to be profound, fails and stumbles into pretension, leaving nothing worthy of redemption in its wake.

... of not knowing what's behind closed doors, that leads us to hope nothing other than normal is going on behind them - whatever normal is. In this case no optimism, which I don't think is normal, there's always optimism, there's always a shade of hope, whether you choose to grab hold of it or not.

You could take a bus full of school children on any given day, in any part of the world, and observe the chaos that results after an appalling accident similar to the one presented here - but few outcomes would be the same after the despair, loss, rage and anger have subsided, and nobody would suggest it was fate. It is however, a beautifully performed picture, it leaves you reflective and thoughtful about the lives of the characters, how they became who they are and what they will become as a result. I don't buy the loss as a metaphor for the loss of the nostalgic view of the childhood of yesteryear either - that metaphor should be a celebration of opportunity. I would not want to curse myself with the childhood of my parents or similarly do the same to my own children.

When it comes to drama, The Sweet Hereafter represents the finest cinema of the decade. The film lifts the director Atom Egoyan to the highest place of Canadian directors -right next to David Cronenberg. With extraordinary intelligence, Egoyan -the maker of "Exotica"- creates labyrinths of relationships. Brilliantly using flashbacks the director reveals the emotions of the characters to the viewers -a powerful way to make the audience feel anxiety.

The Sweet Hereafter is based on a novel by Russell Banks. This doesn't mean that Egoyan hasn't created a film that looks like his own creation. Very beautifully, even with a sense of poetry, the camera moves in a canadian small-town, a scenery full of snow. The nicely unusual music of Mychael Danna creates the mood when a lawyer played by Ian Holm arrives to the town. A School bus lies under ice, and the lawyer is invited to sue someone for the loss of several children.

A very important slice of the scenario belongs to a school girl (Sarah Polley), who realizes that the grief of loss can't be eased by judging the cause of it. Also the other people of the town play a remarkable role in the script.

Egoyan speaks clearly, but with a sound of personality, about the need of love, the pain of loneliness and the crossing of emotional obstacles. Fortunately someone knows how to direct interesting movies with elements of drama in them. The Sweet Hereafter possesses a brilliant structure where the visual telling breaths in the spirit of symbolism. I'm a very demanding viewer, a true cynic who always tries to find the worst sides of the film, but in this case I can't say anything negative.

I re-watched The Sweet Hereafter on video last night, and am still haunted by it today. It is structured so that you know some of the basic tragic plot near the beginning. This caused my eyes to water at some of the beautiful lyrical overhead tracking shots of the school bus winding through the snow covered roads of the Pacific northwest.

The film switches between the time that the lawyer arrives in town to "help" the families receive compensation, and to days just prior to the accident. We witness a loving "hippie" couple who has adopted a beautiful Native American boy, a loving mother of a school phobic learning disabled boy, and a widower who loves his two children a great deal and sees them off to school by following them in his truck. This same widower is having an affair with the mother of the school phobic--she is unhappily married to a "pig" of a husband. Complicating matters is the father who obviously loves his teenage daughter in Lolita-like fashion.

Part of the theme of The Sweet Hereafter is similar to Magnolia--accidents do happen--perhaps no one at fault... or perhaps all the adults had some part in it without anyone being at fault, as only the innocent children were killed.

The town had changed... tragedy has taken away the town's joy and innocence. The parents are no longer open with each other, but guarded, suspicious... in deep grief.

The lawyer is little more than an ambulance chaser, attempting to profit off their tragedy. Yet, he, too is a tragic figure who has already "lost" his daughter--

He had saved her when she was a baby, yet she has now turned away from him... and his feelings are now ambivalent towards her--he is a grief-stricken, defeated father, who vascillates between wanting to talk with his daughter on his cell phone and deciding to cut her off.

The story of the Pied Piper is interweaved between various events in the movie to give greater depth to the story. There's also a great scene in the movie between the lawyer and the garage mechanic, who has lost his two children, that shows that the theme is much broader than the literal story:

"I'm telling you this because... we've all lost our children, Mr. Ansel. They're dead to us. They kill each other in the streets. They wander comatose in shopping malls. They're paralyzed in front of televisions. Something terrible has happened that's taken our children away. It's too late. They're gone."

This movie isn't for everyone. It's a serious, layered piece with a lot of melancholy. The kind of fare that film critics can love, but Academy voters will avoid. But what it strives to accomplish is done very well. And it will stay with you long after the final scenes have appeared.