The Sweet Hereafter

As stunning tonight as it was to me when I first saw it ten years ago, and not a little more complicated, as I'm sure I myself have become more complicated, and more willing to recover the absence that comes with age, Atom Egoyan's adaptation works very quietly and very decently to torture us into dignity. When I decided in my last year of high school to disown the fiscal and moral conservatism I'd cultivated over my long, disaffected apprenticeship in finance, I refused it under the whimsically haphazard tutelage of Wilde, Baudelaire, Maugham, de Maupassant, this movie, and--apologies--Berlioz and Liszt. Had I not walked distractedly into the theater that afternoon, foregoing whatever certain knowledge my fifth period computer programming class intended, most likely I would have expired by now in some collapsed human caravan outside Marrakesh, sprawled on a briny futon, wretched with dissipation. Happily for me, The Sweet Hereafter humbled, to a degree, the reckless vanity for annihilation that I came as a matter of principle to expect from my masters, to deride as an unmerited weakness in my peers, to admire in myself, and to demand of the world at large. Skeptical of sorrow but noble in his appreciation of loss, Egoyan surely tempered my stupid arrogance--I was even convinced that those who did not pursue pain as a strategy for moral and aesthetic increase proved by their sensible alternative--simple grief and simple joy--their contempt for nature (I was a vain little thing)--by insisting that whatever perspective I adopt, it must accommodate the littleness and the desperateness of feeling. Decadence is a dangerous moral fulcrum that swings its claustrophobia and its infinity on the pivot of what a body can endure: those who feel powerful balance the interests carelessly, capable of surviving, they believe, whatever extreme toward which the instrument sinks; they believe themselves gods. Those who feel impotent against its caprice yield to cynicism, awful in their defeat, believing themselves defeated.

The post is becoming Jamesian; I'll say what I mean. As I watched this movie for the first time since the first time I saw it, when I was a very different person who happened to believe many of the same things I do today, which of course makes the contrast still stranger, I was surprised how well the film knew me. Since my only viewing of it I'd become an altogether different person, and yet the experience felt like coming home to a place I recognize only in my memory, as I reconstruct the child I was when the movie taught me to live softer, to know smaller, and to want everywhere. Age courts infancy; that is its wisdom. As we mature we begin again to wonder, hopeful that time restores in promise what it sacrifices in accomplishment, and that with our sad uncertainty we progress toward not any definite end but toward our uncreated beginning. Watching the movie, encountering this outgrown image of myself, this discarded person, I felt what I could have learned only from Atom Egoyan: sympathy for my past. Even with the voiceover, which I dislike, The Sweet Hereafter approaches something sacramental, something like a blessing. Loss subdues, but the soul that submits itself to a shared emptiness blooms in cold splendor, arduous and ephemeral, poised to ask abundance in what cannot remain. What it receives is the earth, and its own, hard innocence.