Word: egoyan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...There is no such thing as an accident," lawyer Mitchell Stevens (Ian Holm) tells prospective clients in Atom Egoyan's haunting film The Sweet Hereafter. Somebody must be to blame for the school bus accident that killed 14 children in a small Canadian town, he explains to the grieving parents whom he hopes will join his lawsuit. Fortunately, director Egoyan chooses a more complex path for his film, focusing on the capacity for survival instead of retribution...
...Egoyan, however, does not indulge in the potentially lurid nature of this subject matter. He chronicles the tale with a dispassionate, removed manner that subordinates the disturbing incest subplot to the larger story. Egoyan appears interested in broader themes than the dark underside of small towns, a theme long exhausted. The horror of The Sweet Hereafter comes from what characters are prepared to do, rather than what they actually accomplish...
None, of course. Unless you can find cold comfort in cold cash. Which is why a sardonic God invented negligence lawyers. Russell Banks, author of the novel from which Atom Egoyan derived The Sweet Hereafter, has, however, improved on His handiwork, creating in Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm) a man who chases settlements with a chills-and-fever passion that can be explained not by greed but by the suppurating wounds life has inflicted on him. The man, whom Holm plays with superbly controlled fanaticism, wants compensation from an unfair universe but finds momentary relief in squeezing more readily available targets...
Besides being a fascinating and well-crafted annecdote, Exotica is an exploration of desire, loss, betrayal, obsession, and the ways in which people carefully construct reality to make their lives manageable. Egoyan does not present the viewer with a baby-food film, in which the contents are simple, mashed to a pulp, and spoon-fed. He poses questions and exposes searches, which are sometimes pleasant, often disqueting. His is a cinema of investigation, not of morals or simple answers...
...Egoyan's stories are puzzles in which most pieces have rough edges, don't fit perfectly. Even having them all does not make for a complete picture. If reality is hard to understand, Exotica suggests, it is not only because one never knows the whole story, but also because it might not make perfect sense...