Welcome to the first instalment of Renewed Revue, a new column where we’ll look at upcoming restorations, theatrical re-releases, unearthed rarities, and re-issues of older films. With so many classics, underrated gems, and oddities getting their proper due on the big screen or at home via streaming and physical media, the time seemed right to start delving into all things old becoming new again. These columns won’t be full on reviews of the films or their restorations, but rather a look at what makes these releases significant and the enduring power of film preservation.
And what better place to start than with a look at one of the most celebrated Canadian films of all time, Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter from 1997. A perennial sight on many a “Best Canadian Films of All Time” list, Egoyan’s follow-up to his equally noteworthy Exotica (1994) catapulted the director into the global spotlight for a time, and with great reason. A heart-wrenching and squirm inducing examination of trauma, grief, and familial secrets, Egoyan’s adaptation of Russell Banks’ novel is cold and calculated, but boasting bursts of warmth and light that are subtle and the exact opposite of melodramatic.
In one of his most commanding and career best performances, Ian Holm plays Mitchell Stephens, a big city lawyer who travels to a small, close knit community in B.C. that recently suffered an unfathomable and catastrophic loss, after a school bus lost control, crashed through the ice, and killed fourteen local children. No one is quite sure what happened, but Stephens tells families of the victims and the surviving bus driver (Gabrielle Rose) that someone has to pay for their pain and suffering. Stephens’ case rests largely on the deposition of Nicole Burnell (Sarah Polley), a crash survivor and once aspiring musician now confined to a wheelchair, who has larger personal problems that no one else outside her family ever sees. Stephens navigates the insular lives of the community members and their fractured relationships in the wake of the accident, while reflecting on his own relationship to his addict daughter (Caerthan Banks, daughter of author, Russell).
The Sweet Hereafter was the right film at the right time, not just for Canadian cinema, but a world in which people were starting to question for the first time the sticky morality surrounding compensation for survivors and families of victims taken in mass casualty incidents. When tragedy strikes, it’s a natural compulsion to seek out blame and demand satisfaction. In some cases, the blame is easy to discover, but it’s not always clear if financial compensation could ever make the pain and suffering of losing a loved one or one’s livelihood go away. In the case of this bus crash, not only is the idea of blame harder to parse and assign, but the melancholic lives of many of the survivors were already a mess before the accident, making already existing wounds even deeper.
For his novel, set in upstate New York, Banks took inspiration from a real life tragedy that happened in Alton, Texas in 1989. By the time Egoyan’s adaptation was released almost a decade later, the thematic reverberations were growing larger and louder. In the wake of the O.J. Simpson trial, pretty much everyone was paying attention to wrongful death lawsuits and how they could serve not only as a means for financial compensation, but also as a strange form of closure for the families of victims. Two years after the release of The Sweet Hereafter, the mass shooting at a high school in Littleton, Colorado would show how the parsing of blame ripples throughout an entire community. And two years after that, the terrorist attacks in New York City on September 11, 2001 would have a fraught aftermath when lawyers were given the unenviable and impossible task of assigning financial value to lives that ended far too soon. As global mass casualty tragedies and atrocities mount today, we still have no answers, but demand blame be placed, even if the restitution is financial rather than psychological or spiritual in nature.
The performances of Holm, Polley, and Bruce Greenwood (as a father/potential suspect who lovingly followed the school bus every day to see his kids off) are some of the best in a Canadian film. The hauntingly elegant score from Mychael Danna wouldn’t be out of place in a cathedral, and Paul Sarossy’s cinematography captures a sparse landscape and unassuming town with great use of light and shadows. It would win the Grand Prix at Cannes that year, and The Sweet Hereafter would close out the year with Egoyan netting Oscar nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director. But amid all the praise that the film gets on a technical and performative level – and rightfully so – it’s the overall social and ethical implications throughout the story that makes The Sweet Hereafter an all time classic.
The Sweet Hereafter was recently restored in 4K, overseen by Egoyan and Sarossy from the original 35mm camera negative, and produced in part by Telefilm Canada and the Criterion Collection. While there is no firm word on a physical release for this stunning restoration – which made its premiere at TIFF this past fall – The Sweet Hereafter is currently making its way back to theatres for select screenings and runs. It’s a gorgeous looking restoration that makes the snowy landscapes come to new and vibrant life, so here’s hoping that physical and digital release comes to the masses sooner rather than later.
The 4K restoration of The Sweet Hereafter plays at Revue Cinema in Toronto on Saturday, November 16, 2024 at 2:30 pm, with Atom Egoyan in attendance. It can also be seen at Bytowne Cinema in Ottawa on November 16, The Paramount Theatre in Kamloops, B.C. (as part of the Kamloops Film Society) on November 21 and 22, and at Metro Cinema in Edmonton on November 30.
