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Another
acerbic social commentary from Canadian director Atom
Egoyan, whose previous credits include The Adjuster,
Family Viewing, Speaking Parts and Exotica. Egoyan
always makes films about social afflictions but does
it from off-centre. He stabs and jabs at issues in
a non-linear narrative style: people, situations and
events cross and criss-cross, run parallel, and eventually
all strands come together to create the denouement.
The film opens with a lawyer receiving a phone call
from his daughter while in a car wash: the noise,
the surreal activity, the setting all metaphorical
for the emotional chaos in the man's life. The lawyer,
played with sublime body language by Ian Holm, is
a grieving parent preying on grieving parents. He
is powerless to control his own family set-up and
this fuels his mania for controlling others' lives.
A bus crash, a school bus skidded on an icy road in
remote British Columbia and many families bereft of
their children. As the lawyer says, `there is no accidents.'
Someone has to be responsible. Does this mean he is
assuaging guilt for his own daughter's drug addiction?
Or is he accepting guilt? Every family has some sadness;
most have deep secrets. Each copes with grief differently;
but that grief should be inviolate, especially when
they are grieving for children. To be preyed upon
by someone who is also grieving the loss of a child
is the ultimate betrayal.
Many facets of dealing with grief and loss are shown
in this film. The sense of community should have been
allowed to work its healing. The fact that the social
capital in the community was squandered affected the
grieving process. The lawyer is a metaphor for what
has gone wrong with society contributing to a lost
generation of kids (the chemical generation?).
The construct of isolated homesteads spread out between
mountains and valleys, their driveways and private
roads all leading to the unifying main road, the vena
cava collecting from the veins which collect from
the organs to pump the blood into the unifying force,
the heart. This is Atom Egoyan illustrating how community
works in its optimum state. When social capital is
realised. There are many films about drugs and drug
addiction. Drugs are so rife in society that most
modern films must have an element of drug-taking in
them to be truly representative of society. But few
films deal with drug use intelligently. Most are voyeuristic.
How clever to use the narration of The Pied Piper
by Robert Browning as a further metaphor for our lost
generation. The lame child left out: the child who
does not do drugs can be made to feel he or she is
missing out.
A satisfying film dealing with an ordinary family
lives without insulting their ordinariness, or ours.
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