And the peace came to me In The Sweet Hereafter
As reviewed by James Brundage
Indeed the hereafter is sweet. I watched the film on vacation, at a friends, having been cramped in a town where I was isolated from the foreign film, the independent film. Sundance award winners, Cannes award winners: all of them, excluded from my quaint little hamlet. However, I made it a resolution to rent a "real" movie while away, and I did.
The Sweet Hereafter tells a simple tale of a simple people (it felt so much like home) who’s lives are destroyed by an accident that kills several children when a bus goes off the road and through the ice. This alone, however, did not win it the Grand Prix. What got it that was the subtle, beautiful way that the stories are all intertwined: the lawyer with his own daemons who tries to channel their anger towards an adversary that does not exist. The small towners who MUST blame, for it is so human to do so, and who talk about others behind their backs. The survivor confined to a wheelchair. The daughter of the lawyer, a compulsive liar who may or may not have AIDS and has been in drug clinics all her life.
The Sweet Hereafter takes its morals out of a children’ book, in which a piper lead all of the children of the town into a magical cave save one: a cripple (symbolic, of course, of the wheelchair girl), who is the only one who can see the truth after all that has transpired. It is a homage to the happenstance, to the terrible tragedies that befall us and leave us wondering "why?" The irony being that the one who was most affected by the accident is the one who wants revenge the least, and who realizes the truth: that there is no one to blame, but that we must have someone to lay our guilty conscience upon.
Movie Reviews by James Brundage