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    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
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