Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter: fathers & daughters & busdrivers & death

Parents waving goodbye to their son for the last time (1997 The Sweet Hereafter)

Dear friends and readers,

Fifteen years ago Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter was strongly praised, analyzed galore, its showing in local cinemas accompanied by long lines of people waiting outside to get in. Supported by the novelist, Russell Banks, and another script writer, Egoyan defied studio control and censorship, and made a movie dramatizing primal fears, anxieties, illusions in family life in the context of hardship and sudden inexplicable death. Here is a much belated recommendation.

In a nutshell, this film just captures the hardness of our choices, of life’s very stream of painful consciousness. The brilliance of the Pied Piper analogy is the temptation of oblivion. As Roger Ebert says the film is about the grief of survivors, those who’ve done what they had to do and remained somewhat true to their emotional life and needs, a lament for the human condition.
It is a gripping film.

How so? Well, from the very opening you sit there clutched by a sense of defused dread as, knowing what is to come, you watch a group or sets of parents put their children onto a school bus, where they are welcomed up by a kind woman bus-driver (our pied piper figure). The children wave goodbye, the bus drives off, and all but one set of parents never see the children alive again, and the daughter who survives, Nicole Burden (Sarah Polley) seems to be severely crippled. She is in a wheelchair, has to be carried around for life.

Not until mid-way in the film do we get actually to witness the terrible slide of the bus on the ice, its falling across a landscape, and then sinking lower and lower down a cliff into freezing ice, but we are told what’s in store first thing because the film begins with the lawyer, Mitchell Stevens (Ian Holm) attempting to convince one set of angry grieving parents they must hire him to sue the bus company or whoever is responsible for the bus malfunctioning over this mass death to preclude it happening again.

The bus beginning its slide

The chronological straight-forward story-telling line of the movie is made up of Mitchell’s visits to each set of parents to persuade them to sue, his investigation of the bus (camera in hand), and finally him watching over the deposition of Nicole and others in front of a magistrate, preparatory to a trial.

This storyline is interspersed with slowly accumulating flashbacks: 1) of children coming out to take the bus, mostly with one or both parents, these leading to the crash; 2) of the parents’ unknown private lives, e.g. Risa Walker (Alberta Watson) escaping to playful sex trysts with Billy Ansell (Bruce Greenwood); 3) of Mitchell’s life, his coming on a plane and confiding to a young woman his wretched relationship with his daughter, Zoe (Caerthan Banks), itself visualized in interspersed dramatic scenes of him receiving angry cell phones calls from this disturbed daughter who hates him, jeers at him, is ever prostituting herself, drinking, taking drugs, ever lying and demanding money.

Threaded in also are scenes from the present of the parents’ lives apart from their children: each interview by Mitchell captures a trauma apart from the loss of the child: Risa (Alberta Watson) is married to a brute of a man, Wendell (Maury Chaykin) and their son is disabled; Billy Ansell (Bruce Greenwood) is a widower with twins who follows the bus with his car and is thus the sole parent witness to the crash; Delores Driscoll (Gabrielle Rose), the bus-driver is married to a helpless paraplegic. And we witness scenes of parenting, sometimes bad: Sam Burden (Tom McCamus) appears to be using Nicholle sexually and anticipating taking her earnings as a rock-singer. Sometimes good: terrified self-sacrificing (before sickness) behavior of Mitchell when Nicolle was 2.

Ian Holm as Mitchell Stevens on the plane

This is another film and book I chose to read and to see as a result of the publication of my essay on the film adaptations of Anthony Trollope in Bloom and Pollock’s Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation. (See Patrice Chereau & Anne-Louise Trividic’s Gabrielle.) Mary Sanders Pollock has a perceptive essay on the film as mediated to us and shaped by the presence in it of Robert Browning’s “The Pied Piper of Hamelin: “The Power of Money: Browning’s ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ and Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter. Banks’s film about American today in the midwest and Egoyan’s transformation of it into a Canadian landscape make it into this volume because in flashbacks we watch and hear Nicole read aloud Browning’s poem to two of the children who were killed while she is baby-sitting with them before the crash. In Banks’s book the girl reads aloud Babar the Elephant, an apparently innocent story (but see my Disney’s Dumbo & Brunhoff’s Babar) whose hard sting is the deah of the elephant’s mother. Polloy makes considerable play with Browning’s particular take on the folk tale (which she’s published an article about elsewhere), emphasizing the poem’s ironies and a critique of the parents for seeing in their children commodities.

There were numerous reviews and at least 3 serious film studies of this adaptation around the time it came out; all at least noticed Browning’s “Pied Piper” is read aloud (you can’t miss it) and suggested, like Pollock does, the archetypal folk tale provides a parallel mythic story of children stolen away by an archetypal figure of death (the Pied Piper can be so likened), of greed (as the Hamelin townsmen will not pay the Piper for ridding the town of rats and he gets back by removing the children forever from them so these so these Canadian parents are seduced by a desire for money from a court suit), and desolation.

Money is a central concern of Banks’s book, which is based on an actual historical crash and ensuing series of suits. Banks interweaves the intense desire for riches, for payment, for living a luxurious life so rare now in the desperate conditions of much American working and lower middle class life. In the actual case the suit could not go forward because one girl claimed that the bus driver was speeding and Banks turns this girl into a fictional character who gets back at her father who has inflicted incestuous sex on her, has wanted to exploit her to make money and know glamor. Banks shows there is no such thing as community in US life when it comes to money; it’s a war of all on all.

Mitchell Stevens’s baby daughter who gives him such trouble as a baby and when grown

Nicole who lies and ruins the court case

I suggest though that Egoyan’s film’s thrust is quite different. A couple of studies have pointed out how many differences there are between the film and book. Egoyan is deeply sympathetic to these parents: they are not shown greedy for money at all. They are all deeply grieving, and they are poor, eeking out livings in motels, as subsidence artists, driving buses, manning gas stations. We see them devotedly taking their children to the bus. In fact the point is made these parents’ lives are dominated by the children’s needs. What pleasure they know is stolen in fleeting moments. Sam’s infliction of incest on his daughter is kept to one brief enigmatic surreal dream scene and what’s emphasized is how lovingly he takes her to her gigs, how guilty and concerned he feels over her crippled state. We watch him slowly carry her from place to place. The look on her face is continually hard, enigmatic, mean. She looks ungrateful, sly, sneaky and as she tells this story to the younger children getting kick perhaps out of puzzling, perhaps half-frightening them. She seems to want (understandably though) some kind of revenge.

Parenthood is traumatic in the film, especially fatherhood. This film’s core experience is Mitchell Stevens’s harassment and misery because of his daughter’s behavior to him. A parallel is set up between Nicole Burden who lied and Zoe. IN the film there is a sense the parents will not only benefit monetarily; but emotionally. A suit will provide closure and if untrue make them think the accident was not an accident, could have been avoided. They can somehow “get back” and two of the mothers want that.

Mitchell himself is a driven man who cannot understand what went wrong in his parenting. His wife breast-fed the child way past age 2; they gave her all, and the wife is now dead. The girl is a half-crazed drug-addict. He seems to want to get back at someone and says someone is always at fault and therefore it must be the bus company which didn’t take proper care of their bus; if not them, he’ll find out who is to blame. Not the bus-driver he says, and indeed it seems the children were the fantasy family of this woman who is otherwise childless and it is made clear she was not speeding but drove as carefully and cheerfully on this day as she had on any other. But snow (a weather element that can signal death in gothic) is everywhere and patches of ice abound. The landscape is filled with cliffs and turning roads and mountains as in illustrations to many Pied Piper stories, for the Pied Piper takes the children into a mountain from which they never return.

The film’s meaning is conveyed through these juxtapositions of stories and visual pictures, through the close-ups of people’s faces where through the social guise of clothes we see the inner vulnerable spontaneous self. I did like how so much of these couples seemed to be in a kind of retreat. If going it on your own is the way of today’s America, most people are at least in pairs and making their nests as comfortable as they can.

Underlying the film (perhaps this is not conscious on Egoyan’s part) is the mythic book and film, The Bad Seed. Nicole is the ironic modern version of the crippled child of the original Pied Piper story who escapes because he can’t walk as fast. The obverse of the American worship of family life, motherhood, making children the end of one’s existence is the story of the murderous child who sows discord, destroys parents, houses. Only here the children are as burdened as their parents, by these parents’ needs (we see Risa unable to cope with her disabled son) and lack of resources or knowledge of what to do beyond send them to school and hope for a good outcome. We have weeping mothers and fathers who wring their hands or (as in Billy Ansell) go into a rage because they don’t want to have to face whatever feelings they have, but just move on somehow. This is the case with Risa’s husband who does not want to go forward with the suit either.

Bruce Greenwood as Billy Ansell has happy moments too: here he is welcoming Risa into their shared roo for the evening; he enjoys driving behind the bus waving at his twins and honking his horn

But they are not alone. The film seems to be showing us how we don’t know how to cope with life either, or the system we find ourselves in. What kind of solution or resolution of grief is to be found in our court system, an adversarial one set up as a race for money or verdicts of guilty.

So I don’t agree either with a popularly-written attack (Film Fix by Lee) on this film as one which toys on how hard it is to cope with death. It’s true so many films nowadays mirror the miseries and hardships and troubles of American life. They are bringing out into the discussable open the hidden traumas of our lives, for some they are cathartic, for some they validate someone’s experience he or she does not feel as alone. They are meant to mirror the hardships of life on the American continent from wintry Canada to the west to big cities and towns.

The sweet hereafter as a phrase is ironic. These people will know peace when they too follow a pied piper into death – across a mountain. The bus rides through mountains of snow. When last seen Delores Driscoll has become a jolly and gay bus driver again; this time she’s driving people to an airport. Oh dear oh dear.

Ellen