Staying Behind with Loss
J. A. Hanson
January 1, 1998
The Sweet Hereafter, the new production from Canadian director Atom Egoyan, is a highly artful film that can be interpreted as a treatment of the perennial problem of evil. A tragic school bus accident takes place in a small town in British Columbia, killing most of the children on board. The litigation attorney who attempts to compile a negligence case on behalf of the grief-stricken families, himself plagued by domestic tragedy, is Mitchell Stevens (lan Holm, an actor I have long admired, who does his best work ever in the film). He arrives amid the emotional wreckage of the town residents and begins subtly exploiting the parents' weakened psychological state. His rhetoric is persuasive, and he soon convinces a number of families that it is in their best interest to sue the responsible party, once he figures out who the responsible party is, preferably one with deep enough pockets to make it worth his trouble. Not everyone in the town agrees that Mitchell's course of action is the best way to emotional recovery, especially teenage Nicole (Sarah Policy, who projects a maturity beyond her years), one of the wreck's few survivors. She ultimately sabotages Mitchell's lawsuit by testifying untruthfully that the fault lay with an innocent person, someone Mitchell cannot sue. The question is why Nicole thwarts Mitchell's efforts and why she does so in this way. It is instructive to note the attitude of the other principal character who voices antagonism toward Mitchell—Billy (Bruce Greenwood), a man who was driving his pick-up truck behind the bus when it careened through a guard rail and broke through the ice. Billy loses his two children in the accident, which unites him to Nicole in a tragic bond. When Mitchell confronts Billy ...
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