Favorite Movie Series - "The Sweet Hereafter"

“The Sweet Hereafter” – 1997
Directed by Atom Egoyan
Starring: Sarah Polley, Ian Holm, Bruce Greenwood

The best films are ones that tell a simple story in an elegant and complex way. Atom Egoyan’s “The Sweet Hereafter” is about a tragic accident and its effect on a small Alaskan town. A school bus crash leaves many of the town children dead, and a struggling lawyer flies into town hoping to exploit the families’ grief by suing the school bus company. The lawyer, played by Ian Holm, has his own tragic background – his daughter is a runaway and drug addict who calls him infrequently only to ask for more money to buy drugs. She never tells her father this, but it is obvious to him.

I have never experienced the loss of a child, but I have heard comments and read quotes from people who have. The way it is best understood, if it can ever be, is a loss so deep and so out of the natural order of things that recovery is impossible. The cycle of life is disrupted when a parent outlives a child, and the parent carries this loss with them until they die. It is important to consider this when watching the film. The town is in a perpetual numbness. The volume of young, innocent lives lost has left a surreal and emotionally vacant shell.

A young teen, played by Sarah Polley, who was a leader to the young children, survives the crash. She is paralyzed from the waist down. There is a subtext to the film that draws parallels to the children’s story “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” She reads the story while babysitting early in the film. In it, the Pied Piper leads the town children into a cave and away forever by playing music to get them to follow him. One lame child is left behind because he could not keep up. He laments that the town is lonely since his friends have gone. The children and the heart and future of the community have been snuffed out, just as in her town after her friends are killed.

The lawyer, late in the film, tells a story to an acquaintance about a time when his daughter was very young and his wife was still alive. They lay in bed together as a family, and his daughter suffers a medical emergency. The doctor he calls instructs him on how to perform an emergency tracheotomy if they cannot get his little girl to the hospital in time. He reflects that he was fully prepared to do this as he stared at his daughter’s young face. He would do anything for her. This is a beautiful memory for him. It was a time when he had the power to save the person he loved most in the world, a power he no longer has.

This is a film about the loss of innocence and the bleakness of life without it. The small town goes on, but only through the motions. The vibrancy and life died with those children on the school bus. The lawyer continues on in a similar way. All he has left are memories of the simple and pure moments in his life that the reality of the world has now destroyed.