The Sweet Hereafter

I finally got to see Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter. Egoyan is a fascinating, if uneven, filmmaker (Calendar, Ararat, Chloe). The Sweet Hereafter is about a small town that suffers a tragic loss of many of its children in a school bus accident on icy roads. A lawyer who is mourning the loss of his own daughter to drugs seeks to convince the townspeople to allow him to represent them. He argues that there is someone at fault in the bus accident--that the loss is not a tragedy, but negligence on the part of some party that he will find and prosecute.

While the lawyer fractures the community process of grieving and helping each other, the community itself is not presented as some flawless thing: the ugliness of the community comes out rather quickly in the film--there's adultery and incest and unhappiness. But there is also genuine care for and commitment to others.

The children's story of the Pied Piper is the conceit that connects the film. In the children's tale, the Pied Piper takes the town's children away, except one, who cannot follow because he is lame. In the film, one young girl doesn't die in the crash, but is confined to a wheelchair. It is this girl who thwarts the lawyer's attempts to litigate in the wake of the accident.