THE SWEET HEREAFTER (81)

Directed by: Atom Egoyan

Starring: Ian Holm, Sarah Polley, Bruce Greenwood

The Pitch: A personal-injury lawyer comes trolling for business to a small town where several children have died in a school-bus accident.

Theo Sez: Possibly Egoyan's finest film, almost certainly because of a subject so heart-rending it cuts right through the pedantic neatness that sometimes blemishes his work ; some of it is still there of course, notably in some over-explicit theme-spelling - not even Ian Holm can do much with that "Our children are dead to us" speech - but mostly it's a film of such overpowering sadness it seems almost indecent to respond to it otherwise than from the heart, much less to dwell on what it may be "about". Holm gets the best scene, remembering his baby daughter's illness in a sequence of unforgettable texture - it's little things, the baby's air of faint puzzlement or the otherworldly background hum of the airplane where Holm is telling the story, all held together by the actor's subtly crushed countenance and perfectly-judged delivery - but there are other treasures too, the pan down from white sky and snow-clad mountains to our first view of the town, or the moment of crystal-clear stillness just before the ice shatters taking the bus down with it. In terms of narrative it's probably a mistake to dilute the abuse angle the way it does, marginalising Nicole's final testimony : it's no longer a victim's cry of defiance, just a way of defeating the litigation - a rebuke for Stephens, who is a far more central figure in the film than he was in the book ; and it seems unnecessarily judgmental to imply that the kids' death was somehow (as in the Pied Piper story) a "punishment" for their parents' misdeeds, especially when we see so little of the town as it used to be - it's a moralistic viewpoint, when in fact it's impossible to feel morally superior to people who are grief-stricken. Mostly, however, narrative is secondary to atmosphere - the terrible silence of a town that's lost its children, captured so memorably you're quite happy to let Egoyan use it as a metaphor for anything he likes. It's the kind of film where you watch the final credits right to the end then get up very very slowly as the house lights come on ; it casts a spell.