Purely Joyful Movie!

Pretty Good

Excellent but underrated film

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The Sweet Hereafter is an amazing beautiful, but shocking movie. The impact will stay with you for sometime.Mitchell Stevens is a lawyer who comes to a town that met with a disaster. Almost all kids were killed in a school bus accident. He goes to each family to file a law suit against whoever responsible for the tragedy. The families believe it was an accident, while he try to convince them there is nothing called an accident.The nonlinear narrative may be confusing for some audience. In that case, please do watch it a second time. Once you can solve that part, you will get a very shocking movie.Beautifully and carefully made movie got 2 Oscar nominations. The movie is little slow and confusing, but a definitely must watch.Highly recommended.#KiduMovie

In most movies the use of nonlinear narrative is a gimmick. I can think of a few exceptions, like Pulp Fiction and Memento, where it feels elegant and organic; Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter is one of them.Although structure is complex, the premise is simple: a horrific tragedy shakes a small town when the school bus falls into a lake, killing fourteen children. City lawyer Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm) attempts to persuade the victims' families to file a class action; a key witness is fifteen-years-old survivor Nicole (Sarah Polley), paraplegic after the crash.Napoleon, Hobbit, android - you name the part, Holm can play it; this is my favorite performance of his. Stephens, a veteran ambulance chaser, pursues the case because he smells money, but he is also haunted by his own personal tragedy, a drug addict daughter spiraling into self-destruction. When he tells grieving father Ansel (Bruce Greenwood) "Something's happening that's taking our children away", he is not entirely sincere, but it's not completely a pose either.Polley is fine in the tricky role of Nicole, which runs the whole gamut of emotions from exploited frailty to calculating revenge.Thematically, the movie references the tale of the Pied Piper, which Nicole reads to the twins. There are multiple Piper-like figures: Dolores, the driver who literally leads the children to their doom (the long shot of the bus plunging into the frozen lake is uncanny); Stephens, who emotionally manipulates the families into a legal action; and the truly loathsome one, Nicole's incestuous father. Ansel is the foil to three Pipers (he impotently witnesses the accident, opposes the legal action and represents a positive father figure); Nicole is the "lame child" left behind, whose final choice marks her passage from passive victim to active agent.8,5/10

This is a simple story – simple in the sense described in the Storyline on the IMDb main page. But, it's from Russell Banks's novel that Atom Egoyan has written and directed one of the most complex plots ever put to film. For those interested, you'll find a complete analysis of this film's structure in Screen writing Updated by Linda Aronson, published in 2000. Incidentally, Russell Banks played the part of Dr Robeson.Avoiding the usual type of visual cues, Egoyan shows only two dates on screen to help orient the viewer to the time shifts (there are multiple shifts); instead, most are managed and revealed through the context of the scene and dialog. Which means the viewer must listen and watch carefully to stay on track. Some viewers might be annoyed.Adding to the complexity is the presentation of five different stories in the 112 minutes running time: the accident, the intrusive lawyer Mitchell (Ian Holm) and his daughter, Zoe (Caerthan Banks), the overly-motherly bus driver Dolores (Gabrielle Rose), the sex affair between Billy (Bruce Greenwood) and Risa (Alberta Watson) and, of course, the illicit and incestuous situation between Nicole (Sarah Polley) and her father, Sam (Tom McCamus).It takes a master film-maker to put all that together and achieve a work of art. On that basis, all serious film lovers should not miss this event, even if the story is unpalatable for many. Life, however, is full of such stories: read the daily tabloids.Ian Holm is the focus and catalyst of this narrative, for two reasons: first, he is, to some extent, the typical (or not so-typical) "ambulance chaser" after a buck, or too many; hence, much of the action involves his presence. Second, he is also after justice for the dead and lost children, spurred on because he lost Zoe to drugs, alcohol, AIDS etc – so she is effectively dead to him also. By trying to help the town folk in their loss, he hopes to achieve some sense of closure for his own loss – in other words, a self-serving attitude, much like the world in general.I think Holm gives the performance of his life in this film.For me, the greatest pleasure was listening to the voice-over of The Pied Piper of Hamelin, the narration of which is spoken by Nicole throughout the film. That poem serves to function as a metaphor of course for the fate that awaits her and her father: loneliness, sadness and despair in a cruel and indifferent world, while all the deceased children have moved on to the sweet hereafter.Not to be missed.November 27, 2011.

So this is the best rated movie of Atom Egoyan? I love his movies, and I have to say, sadly I expected a bit more. Don't get me wrong, cinematic everything is perfect. This movie is filmed beautifully. Every actor played on an extremely high level and not a single miscast was to be found in this movie! Overall it was a great watch.For me that was only destructed by the story. To me it felt, that the original novel was not suited to become a movie. The whole movie lacked a red thread. Strings didn't seem to be connected, and i failed finding a bigger meaning. All I found have been starting points, ideas. Great ideas, but in the end, the movie didn't work for me. It almost convinced me, but ultimately failed at the ending.