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By Peter Hummers on June 16, 2022

“Accidents happen. Our bones shatter, our skin splits, our hearts break. We burn, we drown, we stay alive.” (Moïra Fowley-Doyle, The Accident Season)

Two movies were released in 1997 that were strikingly similar to each other in execution and effect: examining small communities in crisis at a personal level, they took the lid off of life there, to deconstruct it, to reach a place “where everything is strange and new.”

The community of Sam Dent, British Columbia, is fractured by an accident that has already happened when we arrive: a school bus hit a patch of ice, ran through a barrier and crashed into a lake, killing 14 children. The citizens were apparently able to deal with it—they resumed their daily business shortly, not ignoring the loss of half of their children, but not dwelling on it, either.

Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm, The Fifth Element) arrives from “the city”; an ambulance chaser, he visits the driver, who survived, and the families involved, and attempts to build a class-action lawsuit against … someone—the bus manufacturer, and/or the town, for putting up faulty guard rails, or the manufacturer of the guard rails… He’s slick, and he hides well his mercenary intentions behind a façade of sympathy for each family he interviews.

Stephens himself is trying to save his own grown daughter from drug addiction, and when we see him on the phone with her (she periodically calls him to ask for money) or discussing her with a childhood friend of hers that he meets on an airplane, he seems shell-shocked and stunned, in contrast to the Sam Dent families that he is trying to exploit. They may be fractured, but Stephens suffers from a psychological compound fracture: it shows. When he teases out a compound fracture in the community by uncovering their personal wounds, it goes poorly—for Stephens.

The setting is well realized; the town itself is pastoral and unmenacing covered in snow, and the people are as polite and unassuming as those in Fargo (but less ironic and murdery). When at last we see the accident itself in flashback through the eyes of a witness, it is at a distance, and like a dream. The bus gracefully slides out onto the frozen lake and after what seems like an eternity, sinks and disappears under the ice, and only gradually do we become aware of the screams in the distance.

The Sweet Hereafter was adapted from a 1991 novel of the same name, which was itself inspired by a fatal school-bus crash in Texas. The screenplay, by director Atom Egoyan, also incorporates the narration of Robert Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin (read it here), which is, in flashback, read to the students who later die. Egoyan called the film a “grim fairy tale,” and despite the subject, after all is said and done, it’s as lovely as one.

It holds a 98% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, based on 59 reviews, with a 100% rating from 21 “Top Critic” reviews. On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 91/100, indicating “universal acclaim.” In 2002, readers of Playback voted it the greatest Canadian film ever made. Roger Ebert gave the film four stars, calling it “one of the best films of the year, an unflinching lament for the human condition.”

Entertainment Weekly gave the film an A, saying it “puts you in a rapturous emotional daze,” and calling it a “a new kind of mystical fairy tale, one that seeks to uncover the forces holding the world together, even as they tear it apart.” The Sweet Hereafter made over 250 critics’ Top 10 lists for the best films of 1997.

In 2004, The New York Times included the film on its list of “the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made,” but this hidden treasure only made $3.3 million against a box office of $5 million. You can help change that; it’s not too late!

One storm associated with this film probably took place in the boardroom of Fox Searchlight Pictures on its release—it lost $10 million, in spite of the accolades that it continues to collect from critics and those lucky few who have seen it. Film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave the film “Two Thumbs Up,” with Ebert calling it director Ang Lee’s best work yet, and Siskel calling it his favorite film of 1997.

Asked by French journalists in a 2001 interview what recent films he most admired, Brian De Palma named The Ice Storm. Like The Sweet Hereafter, it has the feel of an independent film, but with a high-ticket cast that included Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci, Jamey Sheridan and Elijah Wood (which is probably where a lot of the budget went).

An adaptation of Rick Moody’s 1994 novel, The Ice Storm is also similar to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 Shadow of a Doubt, in which the residents of a small town lose their innocence, this time in 1973 Connecticut, where the innocence was the dying embers of the 1960’s and the sexual revolution. The peace, love and freedom ’sixties jumped the shark (and bit the apple) at the Rolling Stones’ deadly 1969 concert at Altamont, and The Ice Storm effectively chronicles their last gasp.

It takes place over Thanksgiving weekend in a bedroom community, a commuter town on the outskirts of New York City (which is strikingly similar to the Westchester County town in which I grew up, in the ’seventies). In this quintessential First World, Ben Hood (Kline), who is dissatisfied with his marriage and the futility of his career, is having an affair with Janey Carver (Weaver). His wife, Elena Allen), is bored with her own life, and looking to expand her thinking. Young Wendy Hood (Ricci) enjoys sexual games with the Carver boys and with her school peers. Her brother Paul (Maguire) has fallen for Libbets, a classmate, at the boarding school he attends and seeks to spend the night with her.

On the night after Thanksgiving, the Hoods have an argument upon her learning of his affair with Janey. Nevertheless they go ahead with their plans to attend a neighborhood party. It turns out to be a “key party,” in which married couples “swap” sexual partners, by means of each woman selecting a set of keys, from a bowl to which each man has contributed one set.

This whirlwind of degraded morés finally manifests itself in the titular storm that takes the characters, again, to the sweet hereafter, “where everything is strange and new.”

(Pete Hummers is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to earn fees by linking Amazon.com and affiliate sites. This adds nothing to Amazon’s prices.)

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