Word: holmes
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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...
...Holm responds to this challenge with a solid, subtle performance. His challenge is to portray grief without obvious emotional excess. Holm, the actor best known for his supporting role in Chariots of Fire, seems resigned and defeated. His gravelly voice shows that he is a man defeated by life, merely performing his job out of custom. He only rises from his dejection when forced to show anger, the only emotion that he has left...
...Sweet Hereafter is certainly wellcrafted, and contains outstanding performances by Holm and Polley. But Egoyan sacrifices an emotional relation to the material in favor of an icy and remote perfection...
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...
...mystifying. It seems to belong on a memoir by a minor, faintly boring old poet. It perches rather uneasily atop a story in which Robert, a sweet, dim maintenance man (a woofly Ewan McGregor), replaced by a robot, decides to revenge himself on his rich, cruel boss (Ian Holm) by kidnapping the boss's daughter Celine (a sleek Cameron Diaz). She, naturally, turns out to be spoiled, smart, willful and eager to collaborate in ripping off Daddy...