Word: egoyan
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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...
...flashback, Stevens tells a chilling story of how his infant daughter was poisoned and how he faced the prospect of cutting open her throat to save her, should she stop breathing. Although he averted the worst, Stevens knew he had the capacity to perform surgery on her himself. Egoyan presents this choice by juxtaposing the gleaming knife with the calm infant...
Polley provides the central source of energy in The Sweet Hereafter as the only character not resigned to accept her fate as the sole object of pity in the town. She acts as a balance to Egoyan's chilly sensibility, which keeps the film from descending into pathos but also makes it difficult for the viewer to fully empathize with most of the characters...
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...