A school bus has skidded off a hillside and fourteen children, residents of a Canadian town called Sam Dent, have died in Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (1997), this being the horrific incident the movie revolves around.

I don’t know about the Russell Banks book that Hereafter is based on, but what the acclaimed film is about is the impairment of family and community—an impairment caused not only by the loss of the children but also, appallingly, by the evil deeds of incest and adultery.  Moreover, the opus concerns the necessity of moving on (in various ways) after a catastrophe, even the compulsion to change a mistaken or unworthy course in order to avoid further damage.

Intelligently paced and edited, the film is moving, bold and far from slapdash.  Among the actors, Ian Holm, Gabrielle Rose, Alberta Watson, Bruce Greenwood and others do everything possible to deepen the action.

Cover via Amazon

A Joyce Maynard novel based on a true story about a woman who persuaded her teen lover and his friends to murder her husband became, in 1995, a good film adaptation titled To Die For, with direction by Gus Van Sant and a screenplay by Buck Henry.  Here, the murder of a husband occurs but differs from life in that there exists the lure of the trivial and the brummagem (or does it differ from what went on in life?)—i.e., becoming a professional Television Personality.  This is what Suzanne Stone is consummately ambitious for; she loves the thought of being on television more than anything else, including her affectionate and humble husband.  He wants children, she doesn’t because of her career, and since she begins to see him as a hindrance, she coaxes a teenage boy into sex and then murder.  As well, she agrees to pay the boy’s helper, another teenager, a thousand dollars and some CDs for his part in the murder, but never comes through.  She spurns her adolescent partners after the dirty deed is done, completely apathetic to her crime.

Some of Henry’s humor here is unfunny, but the sardonicism has a way of winning us over and the film never shrinks from facing the sheer iniquity of Suzanne’s doings.  Along with assailing the media, it hammers one nail after another into the murderess’s coffin.  It insists on justice, not mercy.  But it does this, I might add, sans a trace of sanctimony or misogyny. 

Nicole Kidman is poised and, playing an airhead, amusing as Suzanne, and is neither actorish nor by-the-numbers.  Van Sant provides dazzle but knows how to restrain himself in his direction, and Danny Elfman’s biting, mercurial music is one of the film’s best features.

Cover of To Die For

Paolo Sorrentino’s new movie, The Great Beauty (2013), is itself a beauty (great or otherwise) set in beautiful Rome.  It is the large-scale film Fellini should have made instead of La Dolce Vita and Satyricon, both failures, for it is a patently intelligent, always captivating satire-and-then-some about the Roman leisure class.  Now 65, Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) is a writer and interviewer, the heterosexual Truman Capote who sought to live the high life but inevitably feels he has ended up a nobody.  Cleverness about Jep’s plight, among other things, scarcely abates: e.g. when the man asks a priest if it is true that he used to be a highly effective exorcist, the priest simply responds with a sacramental over Jep.

Luca Bigazzi wisely photographed with a toned-down attention to beauty, and there is dazzling camera use.  Galatea Renzi, Sabrina Ferilli, and others are genuinely lovely middle-aged women.  Music and dance are gangbusters.  Sorrentino’s film is almost about itself and nothing else, but not quite.  It’s better than that.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

Italian film director and screenwriter Paolo Sorrentino (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I thought movie acting had gotten considerably better than it frequently was in the past, but after seeing the caper flick Swordfish (2001), directed by Dominic Sena, I’m not so sure.  John Travolta starts out badly but gets better.  Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry and Don Cheadle, however, merely go through the motions, undermining an already rubbishy concoction.  How ludicrous Swordfish is we see in just the opening few moments:  all those explosives wrapped around the bodies of Travolta’s hostages.  From there things just get clunkier, and more foul-mouthed.  Gratuitously Miss Barry exposes her Josephine Baker breasts.  Needless to say, the film is not only commercial but shabbily so.

Cover of Swordfish [Blu-ray]

The Joyce Maynard novel, Labor Day (2009) is, I think, interesting and competently written; but is it also forgettable?

A prison inmate called Frank runs away from the hospital he is in for an appendectomy, then forces Adele, the divorced mother of Henry (the book’s 13-year-old narrator), to drive him to her house where he will hole up for the Labor Day weekend and a couple of days prior to it.  Frank is a likable man not wholly guilty of what he was sentenced for; Adele is a sensitive recluse whose children, except for Henry, died on her as surely as her marriage died.  Implacably the two begin a hidden romance.  Planning to flee to Canada and take Henry with them, Frank and Adele are unaware of certain forces that will firmly block and cripple them.

Appealing details crop up in the novel, and although Frank is a bit too rudely good to be true, the characters are believable.  I dislike the many sexual references that exist in modern American novels but . . . the ones here do not seem excessive.  Or un-called for.  Still, is the book (finally) forgettable?

Actually, I think it comes close to being so, but escapes it by showing the reader what it means when a human life is reduced to the bare necessities, to actions and habits incapable of bringing a person anything like happiness or self-fulfillment.  And it is endlessly compelling on the subject of isolation.  If it were not for this, Labor Day WOULD be forgettable, the kind of thing we’ve seen before.

Two more items:  Maynard’s novel is not a tragedy; it has a happy ending.  And it has been made into a movie.

English: Joyce Maynard at the 2010 Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas, United States. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)