Cast: Ian Holmes (Mitchell Stevens), Sarah Polley (Nicole Burnell), Maury Chaykin (Wendell), Alberta Watson (Risa), Bruce Greenwood (Billy), Arsinee Khanjian (Wanda), Earl Pastko (Hartley), Gabrielle Rose (Dolores), Tom McCamus (Sam Burnell)
Directed by: Atom Egoyan
Based on the book by Russell Banks
Release date: November 1997

A town of people living in the sweet hereafter…

A small Canadian town, tucked away in the middle of nowhere…shrouded in pristine white snow… A town like any other with its intrigues and secrets lurking beneath the veneer of a strong, well-knit community. One night a big city lawyer, Mitchell, drives in and puts up at the motel. He discusses the standing and conduct of the town residents with the surly, heavy jowled innkeeper, Wendell and his pretty wife, . The lawyer is here to set things right. By convincing the residents to file a class action lawsuit. So that they can be compensated for their loss.

‘Loss’ is an euphemism for the unspeakable tragedy, grotesque in its senselessness, which lies at the core of this haunting elegy. All the children are gone. They died when their school bus skidded off the road onto a roadside sheet of thin ice. They vanished into the wondrous land, promised by the pied piper’s hypnotic tunes. Leaving behind their families buried in wretched grief. This movie is not about the accident or the deaths. It’s about what comes after. It understands the selfish mourning of the survivor who laments the misery of his/her own life in the absence of the lost one.

Mitchell goes around meeting the parents. Interviewing the matronly bus-driver Driscoll. Who continues to talk of the children in the present tense. Wanda and Otto the artsy couple, reputed to be the town hippies, have lost their adopted Indian son. They couldn’t care less at the moment about finding someone to pin the blame on. Still they go along with Mitchell’s proposal. Then there’s Billy Ansell who was waving to his kids, following the bus in his pick-up. He heard the sound of the ice cracking. Saw the bus falling through. His antagonism against Mitchell is almost as strong as his sorrow.

Atom Egoyan makes beautiful use of ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ by Robert Browning as a melancholic metaphor for the tragedy. As in the poem, a single lame child is left behind. Bereft and forlorn. Teenaged Nicole, an aspiring singer is the sole survivor other than Driscoll. She is now confined to a wheelchair. And she holds the key to the lawsuit being one of the primary witnesses. Her father Sam is probably the most enthusiastic petitioner. However, Nicole knows that if she speaks the truth, it will have to be the entire truth. Nothing less will do.

Mitchell, the middle-aged, money-grubbing lawyer would have been a caricature in a lesser director’s hands. But here, tormented by his own demons, he presents a portrait of a doggedly determined guy going about his job, to dull his pain. He too has lost a child to something worse than death. As he meets one of his daughter’s childhood friends on a flight, his sadness and anguish emerge in the course of a heart-breaking conversation. Ian Holmes plays the role in an understated, dignified manner, with deep sincerity and empathy.

Atom Egoyan is not interested in stripping off the pretense of small town respectability or in fashioning a legal thriller. Instead he explores the darker, hidden recesses of human emotion. He places his spotlight on a community and studies it as the sum of individual finely-etched characters. In the process, he has crafted an unforgettable and shattering masterpiece.

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