I couldn't quite find the essay I would like to read about The Sweet Hereafter, Atom Egoyan's 1997 masterpiece about a small mountain town torn apart by a school bus acccident, so I figured I'd write what I thought myself. Roger Ebert last week wrote a beautiful piece about how he now feels, 15 years after its release, that Hoop Dreams was the great American documentary. Well, rewatching The Sweet Hereafter, I'm more certain than ever it was the greatest of a certain type of movie the 90's perfected: the indie drama.
I don't quite know the best way to describe this genre, but in a way it's the movie I came of age watching. As a teenager in the 90's, I ate up film reviews, Top 10 lists, critical essays, TV shows. Each year, it seemed a new "understated" drama had upped the ante on quality and verismilitude, that each one was more genuine and true to the bone than the last. This climaxed in a way in 1996, the year in which four indie movies - Shine, Fargo, The English Patient, and Secrets and Lies - competed for best picture. It climaxed in another way in 1995, the seminal year of indie movie-making when Dead Man Walking, Leaving Las Vegas, The Usual Suspects, and The City of Lost Children were released. And in another way, it climaxed in 1999, the year of breakout creativity in the indie world that led to Being John Malkovich, Magnolia, All About My Mother, and American Beauty winning the Oscar for Best Picture.
But in my estimation, that was on the downslope of the true revolution, and the true revolution climaxed in 1997, one of the great, indominable years for movie making. Some of the movies that year aren't as notorious as those others, but they are, in many cases, better: Boogie Nights, LA Confidential, The Wings of the Dove, Waiting for Guffman, In The Company of Men, Afterglow, Deconstructing Harry, Chasing Amy, The Apostle, The House of Yes, Ulee's Gold, The Ice Storm, and towering over all of them in quality was The Sweet Hereafter. Well, almost all of them. In all honesty, I must except Boogie Nights - I think there were, truly, four perfect movies of the 90's - movies just perfect, each second, from beginning to end: Pulp Fiction, Trainspotting, Boogie Nights, and The Sweet Hereafter. I said The Sweet Hereafter was the best movie of the year at the time, but who's to wrangle with perfection? (Plus, I was 15 at the time, what did my opinion matter?)
The Sweet Hereafter is the type of movie that transfixes you with emotion and grips your core. It's told wildly out of order, but then, it's in the exact right order, the central school bus accident occurring just over an hour into the movie, long after you know it's going to happen - until it, truly, has become part of the cold, sunny landscape. It is eventually as present as the clouds or the mountains of the scenic town.
The movie "begins" somewhere in the middle, with Ian Holm's sturdy Mitchell Stephens' car being stuck in a town's car wash, just after receiving a call from Zoey, his drug addict daughter. She attempts to reminisce with him, but he wonders if she's simply doing so in an attempt to ask for more money. We're certain this has happened before. This moment is telling for the movie - the town has malfunctioned, given up the appearance of functioning and abandoned its day to day duties. Stephens opens his door and runs out of the car into the car wash - he too, dealing with his child who is not dead but is just as lost, cannot escape the downpour of grief in the town. He shows up at the Bide-a-Wile motel, where two of the grief-stricken parents attempt to run their business, but in their and the motel's disarray, it's treated about as half-assed as the carwash is.
It then picks up a dual thread of Stephens later, 2 years later, on a plane coincidentally sitting next to Zoey's childhood friend, and before the accident, where the town is a different, functional place. There's Dolores, the kindly bus driver, who in the "present" wears a neck brace and speaks with giant spaces between her words, and sits in front of a wall of all the children of the accident, framed. There's Nicole, the 16-year-old with a budding singing career who is secretly having an affair with her father, Sam. And there's Billy, whose children Nicole babysits, who is having an affair with Risa, who runs the motel, seen "earlier" in happier times.
Watching The Sweet Hereafter, I'm struck by how spellbinding the grief that binds the movie is, the extraordinary sense of detail it takes to make the "present" distinct from the "past" - one look at a character's face, and you know what part of the timeline you're seeing. Yet there's an additional piece. In a famous scene from the movie, around 40 minutes in, Nicole - in the "past" - is babysitting Billy's children, Mason and Jessica. She reads the Robert Browning poem "The Pied Piper of Hamelin." "When, lo, as they reached the mountainside/ a wonderful portal opened wide/ As if a cavern suddenly hollowed/ And the piper advanced and the children followed."
Mason asks about the meaning of the story. Why did the Piper want to take all the children from the town of Hamelin? Was he mad that the town didn't pay him? Was he just mean? They discuss this, and Nicole says she guesses he wasn't mean, simply, very angry. Nicole is a victim herself, of course, of incest with her father, shown to us in one scene (ostensibly taking place later in the same night) where her father seduces her by candlelight. This scene is disturbing because it's sort of romantic - the first time you see the movie, you think back making sure you were right that this man is her father. Later, she comes home from the hospital, paralyzed - a reference to the lame child of "The Pied Piper" who misses all the children, who finds it "Dull in the town since the children left/ I must admit that I'm bereft/ of all the wonderful sights they see/ that the Piper also promised me." She sabotages the lawsuit that Stephens is trying to mount by lying in a deposition while her father, sitting nearby, can't say anything.
As played by Sarah Polley, Nicole is the true center of The Sweet Hereafter. The final scene is one I remembered, vividly, no matter what part of my memory of The Sweet Hereafter wandered away. In it, it is again the night of her reading "The Pied Piper" to Mason and Jessica. Each has fallen asleep, and she closes the book and kisses each one of them on the forehead. We know, from earlier in the movie, she then changes her clothes into something more provocative, talks briefly with Billy, who gives her his dead wife's clothing, then goes on a "date" with her father. Yet here, we see something different. She leaves the childrens' bedroom and walks to the window. She stands, and then the window, covered by curtains, is filled with light. The movie ends.
For years, I thought to myself, what does it mean? I assumed Billy's car had pulled up. Perhaps this was foreshadowing? A flashback to a simpler, more peaceful moment?
But that's not how the lights come up, really - I'm imposing an earthly explanation. The lights are not shown from left to right or right to left, the window lights up at once just as Nicole stands in front of it. The scene is filled with Mychael Danna's moving medieval-sounding flute score, just as the movie is filled with Polley herself singing on the soundtrack. I think of this scene, now, as nothing less than Nicole commanding the gods to cause this accident. She is not mean, just very, very angry. She is the piper leading the children by flute and her music to the portal in the mountainside, preserving for them the perfect love their parents have, and yet making the town suffer for her victimization.
This is an extraordinary conclusion to an extraordinary movie. Twelve years later, it's clear this was the epicenter of the career of everyone involved. For Polley, she received so much extraordinary press for the performance, and was discussed as a longshot for an Oscar nomination. Yet perhaps everyone knew she wouldn't get one. For one, it was a competitive year - Kim Basinger won for LA Confidential, which wasn't such a travesty, even though she beat Julianne Moore in Boogie Nights (truly her signature role). Also not nomiated that year were Christina Ricci and Sigourney Weaver in The Ice Storm, Heather Graham for Boogie Nights, Stacy Edwards in In The Company of Men, Debi Morgan in Eve's Bayou, Miranda Richardson in The Apostle, and Catherine O'Hara in Waiting for Guffman, so at least she's in good company.
Additionally, though, everyone knew she wouldn't get a nomination based on the nature of the performance. Her rage is so internal and never expressed. In fact, the fascination of Nicole is how the rage could be there at all, under such a placid stare. Still, you see it, you feel it. In her extraordinary scene at the deposition, Nicole lies, but so sincerely - she elicits tears even as she is emitting lightning bolts of ferocity, spinning a concoction out of mid-air.
Polley was working a lot right after the movie, she was the "it" girl for a moment because of The Sweet Hereafter. She starred in Go, but then sort of wandered away from the limelight, which is perhaps a reason she was so right to play Nicole. She got an Oscar nomination a couple years ago after all - for writing the Alice Munro adaptation of Away From Her, and in a way, I saw Nicole in that script, too, wandering about that movie's intersection of anger and grief.
As for Egoyan, he was a favorite filmmaker of mine in the 90's. He was always leading up to The Sweet Hereafter, it seems - after kinky, fragmented works like The Adjustor, he just got better and better in quality. A low-grade, video-shot indie called Calendar still seems the work of a daring auteur. Then, in 1995, his Exotica already seemed a plenty formidable tentpole in 90's indie filmmaking. Afterwards, he never quite found his feet again - Felicia's Journey, released two years later, was a half-salacious ramble, and his attempted epic of the Armenian genocide, 2002's Ararat, was a splattery fragmented mess. In effect, Calendar - the story of a couple attempting to location-scout for a documentary about the Armenian genocide as their relationship crumbles - was really all he had to say about the genocide, and it wasn't even about the genocide. It was about a filmmaker who cannot stop what he sees happening.
Egoyan chronicled that sensation best with The Sweet Hereafter, which wanders through a feeling. He drenches you in it, like Mitchell running through his carwash, and finally sees it released by the light at the window. A movie like it had never been made before and has never been made since.
