His previous film, "Exotica," for example, focused on a man who regularly visited a Toronto strip club for "private dances" by his favorite performer. But as we learn more about his past and hers, our assumptions about their relationship are reversed. "The Sweet Hereafter," which Egoyan adapted from Russell Banks' novel, extends techniques Egoyan used in "Exotica" and earlier films. I read the novel immediately after I saw the movie. Egoyan's script is more like a re-invention of Banks' story than an adaptation. For better or worse, but almost always for the better, it finds or invents moments that make his version resonate with his earlier films.
Egoyan opens with a man stuck in an automatic car wash, a predicament that is comic and frightening at the same time. Before he can figure out what to do, his cell phone rings. It's his grown-up daughter Zoe. We sense that something is wrong in their relationship but don't know what. And his problem -- his name is Mitchell Stephens and he's a lawyer - is to get out of the car wash.
He's in a small town huddled near the Adirondacks, a summer place for downstaters. Now it's winter, and there's no one there except men and women whose lives were torn up by an accident that killed fourteen children when a school bus plunged into a frozen lake. Stephens is there to sign up clients for a lawsuit in which he will voice their "moral anger." He explains to grieving parents that there is no such thing as an accident. Someone is always to blame. As he move the suit forward, we discover more about the network of relationships holding this town together. Billy Ansel, who lost his two kids in the crash, has long been the secret lover of Risa Walker, married to Wendell Walker and mother of young Sean, another crash victim. Billy's babysitter, Nichole Burnell, survived the crash but is now paralyzed from the waist down, a "wheelchair girl" as she calls herself. Lost in a different kind of grief is Dolores Driscoll, the bus driver. She survived; fourteen of the children she loved didn't.
This sad story is enough by itself to draw us in. On one level we're always fascinated by other people's grief; at least it's not ours. But Egoyan breaks up the story to force us to actively reconstruct it as the movie goes on. His screenplay weaves back and forth in time, from before the accident to the accident itself to its immediate aftermath and to a time, two years later, when Stephens is on a plane heading to an unknown destination to meet, he hopes, his daughter Zoe.
Where Banks organizes his novel as four first-person accounts, Egoyan focuses on Stephens, alternating between the lawyer and his clients. The movie builds up his role, presenting him at first as an outsider eager to capitalize on the town's loss. But more than money drives him. Egoyan builds up his troubled relationship, conducted exclusively by cell phone in the movie, with Zoe, a drug addict who's been in and out of treatment centers for years. This goes well beyond Banks' novel.
But Egoyan's elaborations add depth to Stephens, help us understand what drives him, and make us see that the lawsuit he stirs up may be his way of redirecting his own rage. But the town of Sam Dent (that's the name in the book; it's unnamed in the movie) can't afford other people's problems. The movie's resolution affirms, disturbingly but accurately, that nothing can assuage their pain. The Ansels, the Walkers, the Ottos, and all the rest live in the "sweet hereafter" of perpetual grief.
Focusing on Stephens allows Egoyan to re-frame several of Banks' themes and to add another layer to the story. Thinking like a filmmaker, Egoyan carefully constructs visual oppositions between Stephens, who always appears to be stuck someplace (in a car wash, on a plane) trying to control his emotions, and the vast, snowy panorama of a mountain town in winter. Scenes cut from dimly lighted inside shots to vistas of white seen from afar. The visual style helps us "see" Stephens' predicament: he can't grasp how the fact of where his clients live binds them together.
I don't have space to go into detail on the brilliant fusing of narrative and visuals in "The Sweet Hereafter." I just have room to applaud Ian Holm for exposing all facets of Mitchell Stephens , and the rest of the cast, which includes Egoyan regulars such as Bruce Greenwood (Billy Ansel here, the lead in "Exotica"), Gabrielle Rose, and Egoyan's wife Arsinee Khanjian. Tom McCamus, a regular at the Stratford Festival, plays Nicole Burnell's father (and plays it well, although Egoyan appears to have left material on the cutting room floor which, in the book, helps explain his daughter's actions in the movie). Side note: McCamus and actor Stephen Ouimette starred in a Stratford production of "Waiting for Godot" I saw two seasons ago. It is being reprised this summer. Ouimette had a small role in Egoyan's "The Adjuster" several years ago.
1997 was a disappointing year at the movies. I don't like Best and Worst lists. Anyway, my Best list for 1997 would be short. But here goes my Top Choice: "The Sweet Hereafter," for its intelligence, its emotion, the quality of its acting, the harmony between visual style and theme - and sheer power which makes you sit there caring about these characters and thinking about them at the same time. It's my pick for Best Movie of 1997.