Saturday Review: Adaptation of the week No. 58 The Sweet Hereafter (1997)
The Guardian – United Kingdom
May 14, 2005
ANDREW PULVER
Author: Russell Banks (b1940) grew up in New Hampshire and, after a
childhood and adolescence marked by family strife and low-paid work,
he moved to Boston and experienced the burgeoning counterculture first
hand. After attending college in his mid-20s, Banks found academic
work, and started publishing stories in the late 1960s. In 1974 his
first novel, Family Life , came out. A spell living in the West Indies
in the mid-70s resulted in The Book of Jamaica (1980), but it was
Continental Drift (1985) that proved a breakthrough. Banks was
subsequently hired by Jonathan Demme to work on a screen adaptation
that never materialised. Affliction (1989) and The Sweet Hereafter
(1991) cemented his reputation, as did the film versions of both that
followed in the mid-90s. Banks currently teaches at Princeton and his
most recent novel, The Darling (2005), is set against the civil
turmoil in Liberia.
Story: Banks was inspired by a school bus crash in Alton, Texas in
1989 that killed 21 children. He relocated the story to a
characteristically icebound New England landscape (the fictional town
of Sam Dent, New York). The crash and its aftermath is presented in
four sections, each told as a first-person narrative by a different
character: the bus driver, the principal witness, the lawyer who leads
an attempt to gain compensation, and a survivor. Banks uses the
changing perspective to throw light on the moral and emotional
subtleties surrounding the trauma – most disturbingly in the final
section, when the survivor deliberately wrecks the legal action as
revenge against her abusive father.
Film-maker: Born in Egypt in 1960 to Armenian parents, Atom Egoyan was
raised in Canada after his family emigrated. His early features,
including Family Viewing (1987) and The Adjuster (1991), were studies
of emotional dependency and addiction. In Calendar (1993), Egoyan
himself played a photographer returning to Armenia in an
autobiographical cultural essay. He subsequently explored the Armenian
genocide in Ararat (2002). For The Sweet Hereafter , Egoyan cast
veteran British character actor Ian Holm alongside his regular
collaborators, which include his Lebanese-Armenian wife Arsinee
Khanjian.
How book and film compare: Egoyan dispenses with the novel’s
four-voice structure, reconfiguring events so that the lawyer,
Mitchell Stephens, becomes the central figure. Stephens’ difficulties
with his own daughter, Zoe, therefore become more significant to the
narrative, paralleling the town’s plight over losing so many
children. Egoyan also removes the sexual abuse element from the final
act, making the motivation of the wheelchair-bound victim, Nicole,
considerably more ambiguous. Egoyan considered the story a “grim
fairytale”, and introduced a Pied Piper motif (along with a medieval
music score) to underline its fabular nature.
Inspirations and influences: Part of a Canadian film-making generation
that included David Cronenberg, Egoyan has cut out an individual path,
but shares with Cronenberg a fascination with fetishistic and
addictive behaviour, though to less gruesome effect. As a poet of
dislocation and isolation, Egoyan’s closest equivalent is arguably
American writer-director Paul Schrader, who made an adaptation of
another Banks novel, Affliction , in the same year as The Sweet
Hereafter .
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress