RECENT months produced a spate of films even Argus couldn’t have coped with. Let me dispatch a few with condign un-ceremoniousness. The Canadian Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, from a seemingly better novel by Russell Banks—about a school bus that skids into icy waters drowning a number of children, and what that does to the morale of a small town—is marred by several things, chiefly Egoyan’s screenplay. Ian Holm plays a well-meaning but officious lawyer who tries to make the grieving families sue for damages, but inhibiting skeletons come out of everyone’s closet, including his own.
As usual, Egoyan cannot resist his terminal pretentiousness. He introduces visual/verbal quotations from the poem “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” as if Browning had bearing on Banks, which is manifest nonsense. He also invents an endless framing conversation on an airplane that detracts more than it adds. He allows the odiously attitudinizing Mychael (sic) Danna to compose a preposterous score, and casts a number of small-time actors in roles that make too large demands. Except for Holm’s performance and the silverpoint-like wintry landscapes, everything about the film matches human disaster with artistic catastrophe.
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