The Sweet Hereafter

THE SWEET HEREAFTER                A                    

Canada  (110 mi)  1997  ‘Scope  d:  Atom Egoyan 

When, lo, as they reached the mountain-side,
A wondrous portal opened wide,
As if a cavern was suddenly hollowed;
And the Piper advanced and the children followed,
And when all were in to the very last,
The door in the mountainside shut fast…

—Verse 13, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, by Robert Browning (1888), Robert Browning: the Pied Piper of Hamelin: the complete text

Egoyan’s ferociously sorrowful adaptation from the Russell Bank’s novel, a stunningly beautiful, mesmerizing film that leaves one in a trance, always understating the power of the subjects, using skillful interwoven time periods, parceling out little bits and pieces of information, much of it told in flashback, moving fluidly back and forth across month’s of screen time, beautifully photographed by cinematographer Paul Sarossy, with a medieval and renaissance musical score by Mychael Danna, all in a rhythmic, musical dialogue of pure cinematic poetry.  One of the most powerful, yet at the same time, so quietly affecting and profoundly moving films, with so much empty space to fill, both in the visual outer and emotional inner worlds, and with such haunting music which becomes the lead character in the film, leading us like moths to a flame through this amazing emotional landscape.  Egoyan had just became a father when this film was made, changing the setting of the book from upstate New York to British Columbia, also reducing a multiple first person narrative of five characters in the book to two main characters, while adding references to The Pied Piper of Hamelin that are not in the book, which so impressed author Russell Banks that he has a small role in the film as the town doctor, freely admitting that he felt Egoyan’s adaptation of Browning’s poem is an improvement over the demolition derby imagery used in the book, which was based upon a real event, a 1989 Bus crash in Alton, Texas where twenty-one children drowned, forty-nine others were injured and it led to a massive $150 million dollar litigation, out of which the participating lawyers earned roughly $50 million dollars in fees.  The film won the 2nd place Jury Prize at Cannes, also the FIPRESCI prize, and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, where a once every decade, 2004 Toronto Film Festival polling of festival programmers, film critics, industry professionals and Canadian film scholars ranked the film fourth in the Top 10 Canadian Films of All Time. 

 

The film is set in a small Canadian mountain town in the winter calm which followed the deaths of fourteen children who died in a school bus crash.  Ian Holm plays Mitchell Stevens, the city lawyer who tries to represent the grieving parents, all living in separate, isolated homes with long, winding driveways in a class-action lawsuit against the bus company with the ultimate promise of money, to give direction to their anger and “the sheer magnitude of your suffering,” yet leaving them in a more divided state of anger and disarray.  At the same time he seeks to find expression for his own loss and anger, “you suffer enough rage and helplessness and your love turns to something else, it turns to steaming piss,” while losing his daughter Zoe (Caerthan Banks, Russell Banks’ daughter) to a world of drug addiction, clinics, flop-houses, more drugs, more money for drugs, all premised on her lie that she was going to try for something better.  But she only grows more faraway and distant, lost to the streets, where eventually she contracts HIV and he is consumed with losing her, which is contrasted against the innocence of Zoe as a beautiful child, with an extraordinary memory of horror when she was bit by baby black widow spiders and he had to be prepared “to go all the way,” to surgically cut her throat, per a doctor’s phone instructions, to save her life, as otherwise the swelling would cause her to stop breathing before she could get to the hospital.  This is contrasted against yet another ominous story of the Pied Piper, a bedtime story lulling the children to a sweet rest, after ridding a town of rats, the Pied Piper took the children away because he was mad they refused to honor their debt to him, so he wanted the town punished.  Promising a place “where everything was strange and new,” the Pied Piper lured the children out of the town, all skipping and dancing after his wonderful music to an open portal in the mountainside before it closed up.  Yet one was left behind, “one was lame and could not dance the whole of the way.”  The prominent use of a fairy tale motif effectively alters the point of view to that of the children, giving meaning to the bus crash from a child’s perspective—the unheard voices.   

As the lawyer, tormented by the fate of his own daughter, Stevens meets the families, which the audience meets as well, becoming familiar, trying to convince them “There is no such thing as an accident…It’s up to me to ensure moral responsibility in society,” while the camera always sees on the walls pictures of lost children, photographs, memories, coinciding with the opening shot of a mother, her bare breast exposed, lying asleep in bed with her husband and small child, an image of family beauty, safe and secure.  Another husband and wife see their adopted son off on the school bus, seemingly small against the white sky and the snowy mountains, an act of simplicity, a parental good-bye, an instinctual concern, an unknowing, final farewell before the bus is lost in a beautiful mountainside covered in snow.  Sarah Polley (18 at the time) plays Nicole, the lone survivor of the crash, a 15-year old left paralyzed from the waist down, clearly identifying with the cripple who was left behind, feeling guilty that she survived when others perished, seen reading the poem as she babysits for the two children of Billy Ansel (Bruce Greenwood), children who later die in the accident, so eloquently interspersed throughout, providing a magnificent performance, singing Tragically Hip’s theme song “Courage,” Sarah Polley - Courage (The Sweet Hereafter) - YouTube (4:20).  She is, herself, a victim of her own father’s incest, and burns with rage at him now that she is crippled and in a wheelchair, no longer able to realize her dream.  “I’m a wheelchair girl now and it’s hard to pretend I’m a beautiful rock star.  Remember, Daddy, that beautiful stage that you were going to build for me?  You were going to light it with candles.”  As the accident is shown, the children’s screams are consumed in a hushed silence, to a deeper agony within our memory, to a place where only silence answers, to a sweet peace, where train whistles can be heard in the background offering silent passage to “the sweet hereafter,” a place where people can find peace with their fate.    

It’s dull in our town since my playmates left!
I can't forget that I’m bereft
Of all the pleasant sights they see,
Which the Piper also promised me.
For he led us, he said, to a joyous land,
Joining the town and just at hand,
Where waters gushed and fruit-trees grew,
And flowers put forth a fairer hue,
And everything was strange and new.

But this peace is disrupted and disturbed by the town’s reaction to the lawyer, by an innocent girl’s misplaced blame, by a silent rage and a promise that money can somehow make things right, where the lives of the townspeople begin to disintegrate, severing the ties and values that created this community.  Billy pleads with Nicole’s parents to drop the lawsuit, “I’ll even give you the money I got for my kids.  That’s the way we used to do it, remember?  Help each other, because this was a community.”  Developing themes of guilt, separation, anger, unnamable sin, and excruciating loss, the human response to such a nightmarish tragedy is to seek relief, compensation, and perhaps even closure for their loss.  But that remains elusive and unattainable, as each individual weaves their own way through the various stages of loss, where Dolores (Gabrielle Rose) the bus driver and the parents of the lost children all end up someplace different, if only mentally, because life as they knew it had changed forever.  At the sight of the relocated bus driver, we hear the words of Nicole in a voiceover, “As you see her, two years later, I wonder if you realize something, I wonder if you understand that all of us, Doloros, me, the children who survived, the children who didn’t, that we’re all citizens of a different town now.  A place with its own special rules, special laws, a town of people living in the sweet hereafter.”  Holm and Polley give career best performances on the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, where he is an estranged parent and a hollow soul, where anger and frustration cuts through his icy exterior, while she is a lost child and violated innocent, yet remains the fiercely intelligent moral center throughout.  In the world of quiet yet lacerating chamber dramas, this is a towering work, perhaps the film that all other works of heart-wrenching trauma and despair must compare themselves to, shot in the silence and vast wintry landscape of endless snow, an extraordinary film about grief, about broken promises, and the lonely, personal search within ourselves to find redemption. 

Rabbit Hole

RABBIT HOLE           A-              
USA  (91 mi)  2010  d:  John Cameron Mitchell

Any movie featuring Dianne Wiest these days is definitely worth seeing, as she makes rare screen appearances and has simply become one of the more openhearted actresses whose captivating warmth is unlike anyone else, as opposed to Nicole Kidman who has taken on empty-hearted, angry and hateful roles, characters that retreat into the comfort zone of grief and self-centeredness so they no longer give a damn about anyone else, where tragedy is her excuse to behave so badly.  Based on a Tony Award and Pulitzer prize-winning play by David Lindsay-Abaire, there is already a structure in place here, where a married couple, Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart) find themselves in the throes of grief after losing their 4-year old son in an unfortunate car accident when he chased the family dog into the middle of the street.  By the time we meet them, the characters have retreated into a disturbing sense of isolation and feelings are already compartmentalized, where characters are under extreme emotional duress expressed by their failed attempts at self control, where occasionally extremely hurtful and inappropriate comments would blurt out, usually in the presence of their family, including Becca’s kindhearted mother (Dianne Wiest) and hard-edged sister (Tammy Blanchard) who announces she’s pregnant.  So life goes on, with or without them.   

While they live on an idealized lakefront home with plenty of glass windows, this is an emotionally austere drama filled with gaping silences, where the couple is so over-defensive that every word and thought is misunderstood or somehow a reference to their lost son, where there’s no chance whatsoever that they could talk about it.  When they go to a grieving family support group, Becca mocks how ridiculous it all is, offering ingratiatingly phony comfort when there’s simply none to be had, the exact view she takes with her mother who sympathizes with Becca, as she lost a 30-year old son to drug addiction.  But Becca wants no sympathy or support, as she has no quick fix solutions, but finds it’s better to grieve and be unhappy, irrespective how others feel about it.  Howie, for instance, feels ready to try to move on, not to plummet to some undefined abyss of despair where there’s no way out, but Becca will have none of it.  Her grief is her life, and she’ll allow no one to stand in her way.  In this manner, she’s become another fiercely contemptible character that Kidman associates herself with these days, older and more hurtful roles, like MARGOT AT THE WEDDING (2007), where she becomes monstrous.  Her mother and sister take refuge in each other, as they build a line of defense against Becca, who is constantly in attack mode.  Every time her mother attempts to soften the blows and provide a mother’s nurturing love, Becca hurls abusive invectives with the ease of a sailor’s profanity.                 

There is a wonderful twist in the story that becomes the best part of the film, where something finally captures Becca’s interest and she’s not so surly all the time, where we finally see a softer side that is remarkably poignant and sensitive.  It’s as if she’s discovered her own support group that she’s forced to keep secret from her husband.  At the same time, Howie has discovered other women are interested in him, providing comfort in areas Becca is just not yet ready to deal with yet, remaining sexually frozen in time, afraid to ever feel again.  Their emotional flight from one another becomes a personal road of salvation for each, which is a very fragile and delicate thing, as both continue to avoid one another while secretly seeking comfort in their own ways.  It’s here that the delicate music by Anton Sanko plays such a key role, as there’s finally something brewing underneath the emotional fireworks that continue to gnaw at their lives.  The film is restrained and movingly directed, shot unfortunately on digital, but also superbly edited, with segments cut into small fragments of life, ordinary moments that resemble our own lives, never overreaching or creating a distance between the audience.  Instead, this is a film of inclusion, where after repeatedly being kept out by the incendiary emotional trauma, the audience is finally allowed back into the center of the picture, where this family is no different from our own, and it’s the human condition that finally brings us all back together again inhabiting the same space.  This is an edgy and painful journey of redemption exposing shattered pieces of the human soul, perhaps reminiscent of the transcending sadness in Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (1997), where by the end no one feels quite the same as when they began the journey.   

The Silence (Das letzte Schweigen)

THE SILENCE (Das letzte Schweigen)            B+  
Germany  (111 mi)  2010  ‘Scope  d:  Baran bo Odar                Official site [de]

Not to be confused with Ingmar Bergman's THE SILENCE (1963) or Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Iranian film THE SILENCE (1998), where this film may not stand with that elite company, however the Swiss director has worked as a second unit assistant director for the Maren Ade film THE FOREST FOR THE TREES (2003), an unusual German film told in a measured and meticulously distinct, realist manner with a truly provocative final sequence.  A film with no opening credits, here the opening shot surveying the gorgeous Bavarian landscape sets the scene, resembling the aerial shot in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997) following a car as it makes its way down a tree-lined highway, where this homage is likely not accidental, especially considering the content of the movie.  Writing, directing, and producing his first feature-length film, it also explores the unpleasant underbelly of an otherwise orderly and mainstream German society where people on the surface at least have nothing to fear, where children are often left on their own, probably resembling the quaint life in most small towns where everybody knows everybody else. Set in the pastoral heartland of Germany in 1986 with golden, waist-deep wheatfields extending to the horizon, we watch the tail end of what may be a snuff film, or at the very least, a pedophile’s sexual fantasy, where two men, Peer, Ulrich Thomsen, a Danish actor seen in Susanne Bier’s film In a Better World (2010), and Timo (Wotan Wilke Mohring) then hop into a car on the lookout for young prey, eying an 11-year old girl Pia (Helene Doppler) riding her bicycle alone down an isolated country road, where the girl is viciously raped and murdered in the wheatfields by Peer as Timo passively watches in a state of shock and horror at the outcome, her body dumped into a lake afterwards, where the killers were never caught, as Timo mysteriously disappears afterwards in a mixture of anger and personal disgust. 

The film jumps ahead 23 years, introducing an entirely new set of characters, including another young girl, 13-year old Sinikka (Anna Lena Klenke) who storms out of her parent’s house in a furious rage after a perceived invasion of her privacy, never to be seen or heard from again, as she becomes the victim of a copycat killing at the exact same location, where the police are again without a suspect for the crime.  The community is in an uproar, where the police have no answers for a seethingly angry public, but we also see the stunned reactions of the parents, including Elena (Katrin Saß) the mother of the first girl, Pia, who lives only a few hundred yards away from the murder site and has to undergo the experience all over again, where people are dumfounded and shocked at the gruesome similarities.  While only the audience sees the original perpetrators, everyone remains clueless about both crimes, where the community is aghast at having to re-live through this same horrible ordeal again.  Adapted by the director from the second of three Jan Costin Wagner novels, Das Schweigen (2007), all of which take place in Finland featuring the same lead character, Detective Kimmo Joentaa, a rather frumpy and hapless looking detective who in the movie becomes David Jahn (Sebastian Blomberg), a damaged soul still mourning the death of his wife from cancer, which happens in the first novel, Ice Moon (2003).  Perhaps because of his own personal experience, Detective Jahn, along with the steadfast help of his devoted partner, Jule Böwe as the pregnant detective Jana Gläser, they are the only ones in law enforcement who see this as more than a case to dispose of to make the public get off their backs, as there are larger implications that are routinely being ignored.  What is truly exceptional here is rather than invest energy attempting to solve the crime, the director is more interested in examining a cross section of people affected by the crime, where their response becomes the dramatic focus of the picture.  

The director doesn’t forget Peer and Timo, much older now and barely recognizable, where Peer remains at the same apartment complex working as the maintenance worker, where the audience immediately senses the obvious, the presence of a pedophile literally surrounded by unsuspecting children playing in the yard area that he maintains.  Timo on the other hand has moved to another city and is married with two children, where his wife Julia (Claudia Michelson) believes he’s an architect away from home for a few days inspecting a site location, while in fact he’s gone to visit Peer after the second murder, suspecting from the similarities that he’s involved.  Timo remains conflicted about the visit, still feeling guilty about the original incident that Peer has long since forgotten, yet their meeting together is the Macbethian stain from which all tragedy occurs, where countless more characters are still having to deal with the ugly ramifications of their actions.  The film is reminiscent of Tony Hillerman detective stories, where the overwhelming prominence of the natural environment affects each and every one of the characters, where the beautiful and tranquil landscape shots here are a stark contrast to the mental anguish and torment felt by entire community, much like the overriding grief felt throughout David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990 – 91), where the small town police work is really more of an excuse to reconnect several of the characters, alternately shifting various points of view, keeping the audience off balance while brilliantly interweaving the piano and violin in the stylishly original music of Michael Kamm and Kris Steininger as Pas de Deux.  While Wagner’s book is more like INSOMNIA (1997), a Nordic noir murder mystery that takes place in the Scandinavian summer heat under the perpetual midnight sun, introducing a dreamy, almost unreal quality to it, this movie is more interested in exploring and exposing the depths of human anguish, reconnecting people’s lives to deep seeded feelings that were long thought dormant, becoming a sad and sorrowful elegy for the dead.  Like Egoyan’s THE SWEET HEREAFTER (1997), the film is an accomplished expression of community despair, somewhat disguised as a detective whodunit story, but instead becomes a complex study of grief, remorse, obsession, and the persistence of long pent-up guilt.   

The Loneliest Planet

THE LONELIEST PLANET        B                

USA  Germany  (113 mi)  2011  d:  Julia Loktev 

The rise of the road increases, the mountains close in more and more tightly, and it seems as though there is no longer any hope; only a bit of sky is visible above our heads. It has a disheartening effect on us; we are overwhelmed and keep silent. Suddenly, at a sharp turn in the road, a huge chasm opens up on our right… 

—In Wonderland, on his visit to the Russian Caucasus in 1899 by Knut Hamsun,1903 

Julia Loktev emigrated to America from Russia at age 9, so she s intimately familiar with the immigrant experience, which she uses here as a kind of minimalist existential travelogue through the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia, one of the former Soviet satellite countries bordering Russia, now an independent nation since 1991.  This foreign sensibility is at the heart of the film, though it’s transposed into the midst of an immense mountainous landscape where Alex (Gael García Bernal) and Nica (Hani Furstenberg) are a young couple in love and about to be married spending the summer backpacking across Georgia, hiring a local guide, Dato (Bidzina Gujabidze), a non-professional actor who is in real life a professional mountaineer.  This is about as bare bones a story as you’re going to find, offering little to no backstory, most all of it untranslated at the beginning, as people communicate in mixed languages (where the director’s knowledge of Russian helped her with the older generation in Georgia), where the three of them simply set off into the mountainous back country, where the presence of humans barely registers in this otherwise pristine wilderness.  Adapted by the director from a Tom Bissell story Expensive Trips Nowhere, the film continually draws upon other sources, perhaps most centrally the Georgian/Russian film director Mikhail Kalatozov’s Letter Never Sent (Neotpravlennoye pismo) (1960) and his legendary WWII cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky whose camera mobility is renowned, following a psychological shift from professionalism to the deteriorating mental breakdown of a small scientific team dropped off in the vast Siberian forest.  The only female in the group, Tatyana Samojlova from The Cranes Are Flying (Letyat zhuravli) (1957), creates sexual tension between her physically timid and intellectually reserved husband and the more virile, masculine outdoorsman of the group, set against the remote Siberian wilderness, pitting the forces of human nature against what eventually becomes the strongest force in the film, the dominating primeval landscape.    

In this film we have two cultural sensibilities pitted against one another, an attractive, free spirited woman in the company of a Western and Eastern European male companion, where she’s having a sexual affair with Alex under the watchful eye of their semi-educated guide and the silent presence of the great outdoors.  Using hand held cameras from cinematographer Inti Briones, the entire film is a walking expedition through an immensely beautiful region with little more to hold our attention than the region itself.  The insipid dialogue or barely communicated thoughts reveal little interior depth of character, where all remain a stranger to one another, spending most of their time walking separately, lost in their own thoughts, though at the end of the day after pitching their tents they make feeble efforts to talk, drink, sing, or socialize, but the film never penetrates the exterior façade of any of them.  If anything, the couple remains in a lighthearted and playful mood, where they can barely take their hands off each other until a single event challenges their carefree nonchalance, an event that is never discussed but is allowed to fester, like an open wound.  Like two separate halves of a film, the second half becomes more brooding and introspective, especially as seen through Western eyes, as Nica spends most all of the first half with Alex, but the two barely speak afterwards, where their continual walking becomes an exercise of drudgery, even through such a magnificent landscape.  Nonetheless, the camera holds tight with the visceral feel for extended hiking, walking until nearly exhausted, where Alex collapses into bed while Nica has a prolonged scene sharing drinks over a night fire with Dato, who attempts to open up about his life, bringing an Eastern sensibility into the picture, where what is expected of him is completely different. 

What’s missing in this film is the overwhelming force unleashed by the Siberian forest in Kalatozov’s film, where any human presence was quickly placed in peril, with all previous psychological mind games and personal motivations rendered moot, as survival was at stake.  Here the effect is much too subtle, where there is a major behavior difference, but most all of it interior, used to little overall dramatic effect.  Instead, the focus of the film remains on the physical movement of hiking itself, similar to mechanized feet in a Bresson film, but much more of it, becoming a dreary and overwhelmingly monotonous exercise without human interaction, where the pace of the film slows to a crawl, resembling the treacherous pace of GERRY (2002).  Often seen in long shots where humans are mere specks dotting the landscape, where the director once backpacked alone across Central Asia from Turkmenistan to Kazakhstan for six months at age 22, bringing that same feeling of isolation into what starts to feel like a misadventure, as if something terribly wrong is contaminating the souls of each one of them, where their mood grows darker and more bleak, holding out little hope of repairing whatever’s broken.  The film recalls the interior structure of Atom Egoyan’s CALENDAR (1993), where a Canadian-Armenian couple drift apart while visiting ancient ruins in their European homeland, where the girl is inevitably drawn to their handsome guide, leaving the narrator to fend for himself in what amounts to a strange land.  Unfortunately, while there is a hint of major psychological repression from suffocating interior claustrophobia, Loktev fails to bring any element of suspense or mystery into the long and arduous journey, becoming painstakingly empty after awhile, where the significant drama is all taking place under the surface, expressed through the rigorous minimalism of her earlier film, DAY NIGHT DAY NIGHT (2006), constructing a film through the meticulous accumulation of minutiae.