A bright yellow school bus slowly winds its way down a road through a wintry Canadian wilderness. An overprotective father follows the bus in his truck, waving at his children sitting in the back seat. The bus hits a patch of ice, crashes through a guardrail, and rolls down the embankment onto a lake frozen over for the winter. The ice cracks and the bus slowly sinks into the freezing water. The father watches on, stricken.

"The Sweet Hereafter," a 1997 film directed by Atom Egoyan and based on Russell Banks' novel, recounts this tragedy, but deals primarily with its aftermath.

Overlooked in part because of the "Titanic" juggernaut that rolled into theaters the same year, not many saw the film. In both pictures, a horrible disaster takes place which results in a tremendous loss of life. However, the school bus tragedy hits a lot harder than the liner going down in the Atlantic, mainly due to "Hereafter's" strong character development.

The film traces the characters in five different sequences: Before the accident, after the accident, and during the accident itself.

The most important sequence takes place after the death of the children. Set a short time after the tragic event, the sequence revolves around a lawyer (Ian Holm, "The Fifth Element") looking to file a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the parents who lost children in the accident. Holm's character, however, has problems of his own: His daughter has a drug problem, and he does not know what to do.

Holm visits several grieving couples who lost children, and the film provides a glimpse of a small town where not everything is perfect.

The first couple he visits runs a motel and has a shouting match right in front of him. The wife suggests other couples the lawyer should talk to, with Holm noting that he needs good people that do not have a troubled past. The husband ridicules every pair she suggests, listing the vices of each. But he doesn't know everything: His wife had an affair with a widower who runs the garage next door.

Another family has an even daker secret. A teenage girl (Sarah Polley, "Go"), who survived the accident but is now confined to a wheelchair, ended the incestuous relationship she had with her father as a result of the incident.

A flashback sequence details the affair of the motel owner's wife and the garage owner. Polley baby-sits for the man's children while he goes off to the motel. She reads the children Robert Browning's tale of "The Pied Piper of Hamelin." In the story, special emphasis is placed on a lame child who is left behind by the Piper. Polley is later identified as this figure when specific passages of the story are recited in voice-over as she goes to bed with her father and as she gives her deposition.

More importantly, the tale recounts the punishment of Hamelin for lying to the Piper about paying him. Their punishment is the loss of their children. Similarly, in "The Sweet Hereafter," the sins of the town are related to the loss of their chidren in the bus accident.

Holm identifies with the people of the town because he too has lost a child, just in a different manner. Not a money-hungry personal claims attorney as one might expect, he is just a very sad man. He no longer knows his daughter, who has become a drug addict. In the film's last sequence, Holm flies from Canada to take care of his daughter. He sits next to a childhood friend of hers on the flight, and tells a story of how his daughter almost died from a black widow bite when she was three. Holm's eyes suggest that maybe it would have been better had she died then, rather than to suffer the life she leads now.

"The Sweet Hereafter" carries a tremendous emotional impact. The bus sinking into the lake is horrifying, but takes place midway through the film. We dread seeing it, but we are more concerned with those still living. The people of the town have to continue on. The bus driver, who survived, speaks of the children as "her kids," using the present tense to describe them. The garage owner barely gets along after the death of his children. Holm and Polley seem ready to just give up on life at any moment.

Egoyan juggles these different events perfectly. He deftly weaves from character to character to create an overwhelming sense of loss. Life goes on for the town after the accident, but just barely, and only because it has to. What else can they do? --Video Pick of the Week

Contact John Donnelly at jodonnel2@nd.edu.

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