BEFORE: "The Captive" was directed by Atom Egoyan, now where have I heard that name before? Right, way back when I first started going to film festivals, to help promote an animated feature titled "I Married a Strange Person", another film of his was making the festival rounds at the same time - I passed on seeing it at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1997, because I was busy seeing films like "Orgazmo", "Regeneration", "Cube", "Twenty Four Seven" and Michael Moore's "The Big One" (also playing at the festival were "L.A. Confidential", "Seven Years in Tibet", and "The Spanish Prisoner", but I saw all of those later in other venues.). I don't have many movie sins left to atone for at this point, but missing out on a big festival film still pops up - like I watched "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" last year, and I remember passing on that one at Sundance in 2001. Quickly going through Egoyan's filmography yesterday reminded me about "The Sweet Hereafter", and I noticed it also had Bruce Greenwood in it, so I could slip it in here and absolve one of my last few forgotten movie sins.
Adding another Bruce Greenwood film at the last minute solves two problems, it lines up my Earth Day film with Monday, and it exactly lines up "Avengers: Endgame" with the day I'm going to see it - but skipping a day would have produced the same result, so which is better for me right now, adding a film or skipping a day? It's difficult to determine, but I would hate to get to the end of Movie Year 11 and not have a slot for my last film - but it would probably be worse if I got to the end of the year and fell one film short, right? So that settles it, I'm going to drop this one in and line up next week's films better.
One problem, though - it's not running on cable, or on demand, it's not on Netflix, and for some reason it's not even on iTunes, which is my safety net in case all else fails - jeez, I thought everything was on iTunes, but this is the rare exception. You didn't hear it from me, but it was posted free on YouTube - but I don't want to support that, so I borrowed my wife's Amazon Prime password and watched it there, via her computer (after yet another failed attempt to get the Silverlight plug-in to work on my Mac, very frustrating). Thankfully, it was FREE on Amazon Prime, and my usual solution would have been to watch it on iTunes for $2.99 or $3.99 - so if this cost me nothing, why not add it? I can't keep some imaginary problem that could occur in late December from altering the chain if need be. Thinking of this film and noticing it could be added to the chain easily, that's some kind of sign, right?
Bruce Greenwood carries over again from "The Captive", that's three in a row, with more on the way.
THE PLOT: A bus crash in a small town brings a lawyer to town to defend the families, but he discovers that everything is not what it seems.
AFTER: OK, I probably shouldn't make a snap judgment about a director after seeing only two of his films, but there's nothing else on his filmography that I'm interested in - wait, I've seen "Where the Truth Lies" and "Chloe", he directed those, too. But if I take just yesterday's film and today and what they have in common, he likes to set things in small northern towns (this one's in Canada, "The Captive" was set in upstate NY, close to Canada) and he likes to find tragedy there, this time it's a school bus crash, and then the characters affected by the tragedy are shown wallowing in misery.
"The Sweet Hereafter" also jumps around in time, the story is not told linearly, but at least this time I was prepared for it. And after the first scene had a prominent 1995 calendar hanging on the wall, the next scene showed a TV news broadcast with a 1997 date, so I caught on pretty quickly that we'd be toggling between at least two time-frames. So there's the timeline shortly after the accident, when the lawyer comes to town, and then there's two years later, when he's flying somewhere to visit his daughter, who's back in some form of rehab situation. It's misery upon misery. The first timeline is also laden with flashbacks from the day of the accident, as people recall what happened - I'm not going to call that a third timeline, but then I think there is a point where there are flashbacks WITHIN the flashbacks, so once again, some assembly is required here to piece everything together.
I caught half of "Pulp Fiction" the other night after my movie ended (earlier than usual, before the Travolta/Thurman dance scene, usually I come in just before the scene with the gimp) and that reminded me that when this technique is used properly, it slowly reveals information that is important, unlike "The Captive" that told the audience everything at the start, then we all had to wait for the characters to catch up. What happens here is that the bus crash is the very important part, and both timelines gradually work up to revealing what exactly did (or didn't) happen, and that's kind of the way it should be. But then again, telling us early on that there WAS a bus crash still kind of tipped off too much, there could have been even more impact if we the audience didn't know such a tragedy had happened/was about to happen.
The second timeframe, with the lawyer on the plane, then flashed back even earlier, as he told a story about his daughter getting sick when she was a toddler, and it's a gripping one, and shows the highs and lows, the terrible dual nature of being a parent, the difficulty of watching them when they're sick which I guess somehow balances out the joys they bring when they're healthy? Actually I think the point here is rather unclear, so I'm either hitting the nail on the head here or missing it completely, it's tough to tell. The film's Wiki page doesn't mention this second timeline at all, which is kind of strange - so does that mean it has no relevance at all? Why relate only PART of the film's plot in the description? Many things happen in this film, and that's definitely one of them. Then again, the Wiki page also suggests this film is a metaphor for the Armenian Genocide, and I didn't pick up on that at all - possibly because I've never heard of the Armenian Genocide.
But this is definitely a small town with secrets - and we, the audience get to see who's having affairs with whom, and what happens to the relationships between married couples (and the cheating ones) when a pending class-action lawsuit threatens to divide the town. I kind of really had to pay attention here, because not everything was explicitly stated, particularly people's motivations for being for the suit or against it, or their reasons for telling the truth or lying about certain things. It's hard when characters are avoiding talking about things like their deceased children, it took a little extra effort to figure out which child came from which parent, because nearly everyone was suffering and not willing to talk about their feelings.
NITPICK POINT: During the deposition scenes, there's a stenographer who's holding a weird device up to her mouth the whole time - I thought at first she was constantly sipping from a large coffee cup, but apparently it's a real device someone can use to record their voice, without interrupting the testimony of the witness. OK, it might be a real thing, but it was distracting to the viewer, where someone typing on a dictation machine or writing notes in shorthand would have been less noticeable - so if it were up to me, I would have taken it out.
Hey, this film is on that list of "1,001 Movies To See Before You Die" - God, it's been ages since I made any progress on that list. This moves me up to 416 seen out of the 1,001 - with four more currently on my watch list. If I want to make any more progress on the list than that, I may have to start watching films directed by Bergman and Kurosawa, or "Das Boot" and "The Color Purple". But let's not get too crazy.
And it was interesting to see Sarah Polley again, so this kind of answers the question about what happened to that little girl that starred in "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen". Also, she later directed the film "Take This Waltz", which I've seen.
Also starring Ian Holm (last seen in "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies"), Sarah Polley (last seen in "The Claim"), Tom McCamus (last seen in "Room"), Gabrielle Rose (last seen "The BFG"), Caerthan Banks, Maury Chaykin (last seen in "Owning Mahowny"), Alberta Watson (last seen in "Hedwig and the Angry Inch"), David Hemblen (last seen in "Where the Truth Lies"), Arsinee Khanjian, Earl Pastko, Stephanie Morgenstern, Brooke Johnson, Allegra Denton, Marc Donato, Sarah Rosen Fruitman, Devon Finn, Simon R. Baker, Fides Krucker, Russell Banks, Peter Donaldson.
RATING: 5 out of 10 business cards
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