Egoyan renders taste of real life in bittersweet 'Hereafter'

I saw Atom Egoyan's "The Sweet Hereafter" one fine blustery New York City day, alone, retreating from the miscellaneous pathetic miseries of my life. I walked out a different person. Where once I had been unsure of my path, I was certain. Perfection was possible. There was a reason that I was obsessed with fictions that existed only in two dimensions, only in darkened rooms. And the reason was this: For the thousands of obsequious popcorn-plot movies out there, there existed one that was sublime, that took everything I ever thought about life, death and the things in between and turned them into a brilliant, shining truth.

In the sparsely populated, snowbound town of Sam Dent, a terrible random act has taken place. It is not an act of kindness. The town's lone school bus slips on a patch of ice; the brakes fail, the driver loses control and it plunges over the road ra

Courtesy of Fineline Features Atom Egoyan and Ian Holm, on the set of "The Sweet Hereafter."

iling into the ice-watery depths. It is full of children. The town's children. Only a handful survive, and the bereaved parents and spared children are left to pick up the pieces.

A lawyer, an intruder, comes to Sam Dent. He attempts to sign the grieving families up for a class-action lawsuit. His motivation is both pit-bull financial gain and deeply personal, an attempt to salvage what he can from the loss of his own child through the recompense of other parents that he believes he is psychological kin to. Whether he is justified in feeling that brotherhood of tragedy or is a lousy ambulance chaser trading on suffering is as indeterminate in the film as it is in our own lives.

There are other characters in this morose, wintry play. A mechanic whose wife died several years earlier follows his twin children on the bus in his pickup truck every morning. It is an image far more haunting than any big ship sinking beneath the sea, the mixture of shock, anguish and loss of control on his face as he watches in horror as his children, smiling, waving, are entombed in the school bus. It is the defining moment of the film, a stricken look of pure humanness that drives right to the core of what "The Sweet Hereafter" tells us. We have no control over anything. We watch the people we love more than life itself plunge into an abyss where we cannot help them. Terrible things happen to innocent people. There is no rhyme or reason to real life.

And that is why the genius of "The Sweet Hereafter" is that, at the film's end, nobody has picked up the pieces save one girl, a survivor of the crash. But even she is scarred beyond repair, forced to start from scratch and reevaluate her life. There are no neat little endings wrapped up with bows. There are no moments of tension-relieving catharsis beyond the most subtle of glances. No dead people come back, no lives return to normal. "Things get covered up," sputters the lawyer. "People lie." And that, in its way, is the solemn truth of our own lives. Things get covered up. People lie. But what happens when you can't lie any longer because the truth is so vividly painful that it can no longer be shoved aside? Life goes on but it is not always better, it is not always perfect and it is never, ever the same. The film's outlook and content is not as pessimistic as you would think - it is merely real. The real is so hard to come by in cinema that when it makes itself apparent, it cannot be ignored.

There are times in your life when you are faced with something so holy and pure, something impervious to detraction no matter what others might say, something that is immediately and irrevocably grafted onto one of those empty places in your heart that you experience a moment of wholeness and true clarity. They're rare. But when they happen, watch out. There's a sweet hereafter for me after all. Others should be so lucky.

09-23-99