[In the following review, Rayns argues that Egoyan's failure to sustain a sense of community in The Sweet Hereafter detracts from the film's overall impact.]

In The Sweet Hereafter, Lawyer Mitchell Stephens arrives in Sam Dent, a small town in British Columbia, where the community is paralysed by a recent accident: the school bus, driven by Dolores Driscoll and carrying 22 children, went off an icy road and plunged into a lake, causing 14 deaths. Stephens hopes to mobilise the bereaved parents into a class-action lawsuit against the bus company; he will act without a fee, against one-third of any settlement reached. (Stephens himself has deep emotional problems; divorced from his wife Klara, he keeps his drug-addicted, drop-out daughter Zoe at arm's length.)

He turns to the local motel owners Wendell and Risa Walker for advice on which grieving parents to approach. He also meets Dolores (and her husband Abbott, victim of a stroke) and hears her account of the day of the accident. The first to sign up for his class action are the Ottos, Hartley and Wanda, who lost their adopted son Bear. Risa is the next, followed by Sam and Mary Burnell, whose daughter Nicole survived the accident but is now wheelchair-bound. (Stephens provides a computer for Nicole, to sweeten the deal.) But garage-owner Billy Ansell, a widower who lost both his children, threatens Stephens with violence and advises others in the community to have nothing to do with him.

Called to give her legal deposition about her experience of the accident, Nicole (who has previously insisted that she will not tell lies) destroys the law-suit by testifying that Dolores was driving too fast. Stephens is left smarting, but the community regains a sense of solidarity and learns to come to terms with its grief.

This narrative is intercut with flashbacks to the periods before, during and immediately after the accident, centred on the day-to-day lives of the main characters. Billy regularly hires Nicole to babysit his children while he pursues a secret affair with Risa. Nicole is trying to make it as a rock singer, and has an incestuous relationship with her father Sam. Stephens himself recalls an episode from Zoe's infancy, when he and Klara raced against time to get her to a hospital in a medical emergency. There are also glimpses of the future: some time later, Stephens is on an internal flight and finds himself sitting next to Allison, a childhood friend of Zoe's. The encounter forces him to go over the gradual breakdown of his relationship with his daughter and to describe his deeply unresolved feelings for her. On arrival at his destination, he sees Dolores driving a hotel shuttle-bus. In Sam Dent, Nicole feels that the community has entered a new and happier phase which she dubs “the sweet hereafter.” But her own thoughts still centre on the days when she used to babysit Billy's children—and dreamed of marrying Billy herself.

Atom Egoyan has been notably frank about his reasons for adapting Russell Banks' novel and making—for the first time—a film not based on an original screenplay of his own. “I felt I had made a number of films inspired by stories that came from the universe that was in my own head, but it was becoming all too familiar for me. I wanted to find something that would challenge me and still provide a framework on which I could impose my own structural concepts, and this was the perfect story for that.” He is also eager to cement a direct link between this film and its predecessor: “Exotica ends with a shot of Christina walking towards the house. What happens there has had a great deal of influence on her life. She is not protected in the house. And The Sweet Hereafter takes us inside the house.” (Both quotes are from the Alliance Communications pressbook.)

This is a not uncommon syndrome among writer-directors who base their work on deeply personal preoccupations and use it to confront issues they want to resolve for themselves or to exorcise personal demons: they tend to reach a point (sometimes temporary, sometimes permanent) when the well runs dry. Fassbinder dealt with it by co-opting favourite books (Effi Briest, Berlin Alexanderplatz) or by giving a revered classic a good kicking (Nora Helmer). Paul Schrader dealt with it by remaking Cat People. Egoyan has taken what seems at first sight the Cronenberg route of filming an ‘unfilmable’ novel. His adaptation of The Sweet Hereafter certainly looks like an Atom Egoyan film; simply as an exercise in superimposing one sensibility on to another, the film is so ingenious, so skilful and so nuanced that it's easy to forget that it has literary roots at all. All of which makes it hard to explain why the film is ultimately so disappointing.

The core problem seems to be that Egoyan has miscast himself as the adapter of a novel in which a sense of community is paramount. Few directors have less sense of community than Egoyan: his work has always centred on obsessives and eccentrics trapped in solipsistic worlds, most of whom have cause to regret their forays into social and sexual intercourse, and the surly bonds that interest him most are those within families. Here he does not even present a plausible topography of the town, which never feels like anything but a patched-together collection of locations, let alone provide any inkling of the ways its citizens interact socially. For the purposes of the film, Sam Dent is a group of five unhappy households, a garage and a civic courthouse. And the only elements which knit the households together prior to the accident are an adulterous affair and the feelings of a young woman trapped in an incestuous affair with her father who dreams of marrying the town's most eligible widower and becoming a ‘mother’ (rather than just a babysitter) to his kids. In short, Egoyan's Sam Dent is not a million miles from Peyton Place.

Banks' novel is divided into four sections, each with its own narrator: the structure helps the author to build a real sense of the community which has been struck by the tragedy. In line with his earlier films, Egoyan appears to replace the idea of plural voices with an omniscient directorial point-of-view. The Sweet Hereafter has a fantastically complicated time structure: it has hardly begun before it plunges into free-range cross-cutting between the pasts, presents and futures of its characters, and it feels free throughout to make connections across all bounds of time and space. Egoyan's method of constructing and narrating his films has always had an element of tease: he likes to drop hints, make insinuations, leave room for the viewer to speculate … and to surprise with sudden revelations. The Sweet Hereafter does all these things, only more so. It's as if what Egoyan responds to most strongly in the novel is simply the range of characters and time-frames it provides as grist to the mill of his structural machinations.

The most surprising (and daring) of the film's countless linkages is that between the bus accident itself and the day when Stephens' then-infant daughter Zoe almost died from the side-effects of an insect bite. Egoyan effects the link simply by presenting one event after the other. The implications are anything but clear-cut: the juxtaposition could be suggesting that Stephens' quest to mount the Sam Dent class-action suit is an oblique expression of his unresolved rage at the breakdown of his own marriage and the loss of his own daughter—not to an insect bite and an insufficiently concerned doctor but later, to narcotics. The one thing which is clear (and Egoyan underlines it heavily by using the image of the Stephens family asleep moments before the calamity strikes Zoe as the background to his main title at the front of the film) is the directorial sleight-of-hand which equates a community tragedy with a family crisis.

It's revealing that the ‘glue’ which Egoyan uses to weld the many disparate fragments together is ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin.’ The poem is first heard as Nicole's bedtime reading to Billy's children: it subsequently blankets the film, appearing on the soundtrack even when, at some unspecified point in the future, Stephens discusses Zoe's fate with one of her old friends on a plane. (Browning's poem is not in the novel, although Banks now says he wishes it had been.) The prominent use of the poem ‘rhymes’ Sam Dent with Hamelin and implies that the children who died in the bus-crash were somehow ‘culled’ as a punishment for the sins of their parents. (It also, of course, identifies Nicole with the “lame child” left behind by the piper.) This is a smart and snazzily post-modern way of connoting ‘community,’ but Egoyan cannot make it stick when nothing in the rest of the film supports it. Five pained/guilty families do not a community make.

Banks and Egoyan do, however, reach simultaneous climaxes with the crucial scene of Nicole's testimony about the crash, the only genuinely moving moment in the film. For Egoyan, Nicole's rationally inexplicable decision to scuttle the law-suit by lying represents both an act of tremendous courage and a decisive break with “what happens to her inside the house”—her incestuous idylls with her father, which take place in a barn dangerously festooned with candles. His respect for the novel obliges him to show Nicole's action having a community-wide effect, something he attempts in a rather bizarre way with a shot of a ferris wheel over which Nicole's voice enthuses about everything being “strange and new.” But he follows this by showing Nicole's retreat into her memories of the days when she was Billy's babysitter, closing the film as he began it: with an image of domestic bliss which we know will very soon be shattered. On the face of it, a classic Egoyan moment. But it doesn't kick either emotionally or intellectually, because the ingenuity of the adaptation has obstructed the real thrust of the film.