Inward Atom

An ethereal light comes between the brushes as he pulls into the car wash. Blue and green lights diffuse through the spray and drops of water on the windshield as he gets a collect call from his daughter. He knows she’ll be asking for money again. “Remember that time we were in the car wash, and I started playing with the automatic window?” she asks him. He realizes the car wash won’t end—he’s stuck. He opens the door briefly and the hot water rushes in. This time he breaks out with an umbrella, still soaked before trudging out to the icy gas station.

Atom Egoyan opens his 1997 film The Sweet Hereafter with this surreal sequence that psychologically contains one of his most sprawling works. The man’s a lawyer, Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm), who’s come to a small town in British Columbia to represent a number of parents who lost their children in a local bus crash. This professional pursuit is often interrupted by his drug-addicted daughter, Zoe (Caerthan Banks), who’s always calling from some highwayside phone booth on the urban fringes of a big city. Stephens pitches his litigation as a way to hold those behind their tragedy responsible—there’s no such thing as an accident, he believes. Someone has to be at fault.

Despite being a film set on the edge of the wilderness, high up in the twisty mountain roads of B.C., The Sweet Hereafter is mostly made up of living rooms, motels, and kitchens. Characters are entombed in these permanent and temporary domiciles, not able to move forward with their lives since the tragedy, only able to slip back into the past. Often, this reminiscence is forced by Stephens, inviting himself into people’s homes to make them relieve the worst day of their lives in order, he says, to settle a score with whatever institution failed, with whatever bureaucrat or autoworker who wasn’t doing their job.

There’s another sequence, taking place a couple of years after the principal events of the film, where Stephens is on a plane sitting, coincidentally, next to one of his daughter’s high school friends. She asks Stephens how she is, leading him to flow into a long story of a moment where his infant daughter’s life was in his hands, a moment that’s almost certainly the basis for Stephens’ neurotic re-litigations of the past in search of blame. Tens of thousands of feet in the air, Stephens is trapped with nowhere to go but the memory.

But these enclosed spaces have the same psychological effect on The Sweet Hereafter’s characters regardless of Stephens’ presence. Most remarkably, this is felt in a scene between the widower Bill Ansel (Bruce Greenwood) and Risa Walker (Alberta Watson), who meet up for their affair in a room at the motel Risa operates with her husband. Billy often has to wait until Risa gets a window of time to get away with their tryst, although sometimes Risa never makes it at all. When the two have a falling out after they both lose their kids in the bus crash, Billy says the thing he’ll really miss about their rendezvouses is the nights where she wouldn’t show up, and he could sit in the room alone for an hour thinking about the way things used to be before he lost his wife.

It’s interesting that the location Egoyan chooses as the first example of this psychologically inward space is a car wash, which, a year before, David Cronenberg used in a pivotal sequence in Crash. In the scene, Ballard (James Spader) is driving while his wife, Catherine (Deborah Unger), is in the back seat with car crash cultish leader Vaughn (Elias Koteas, who previously appeared in Egoyan’s The Adjuster and Exotica). As the trio go into the car wash, the top comes up over the convertible, and the windows slide up as Vaughn begins to touch Catherine. The soap and mops pound on the car as they enter each other.

The two scenes couldn’t better highlight the difference between these (sometimes Ballardian) Toronto denizens: For Cronenberg, the confining nature of a car wash is a moment where humans are forced closer to each other, and the visceral nature of the light, sound, and even vibrations of the vehicle allow for a melding of previously separate human and machine bodies. For Egoyan, those spaces only remind his characters of what’s outside their own psychoses. Stephens might be within the vast expanse of the Canadian wilderness, but all he sees are brushes against his windshield while his car can’t move. When he remembers his daughter, she, him and his wife are on a mattress on the floor in a big, open room. Now she only knows him in a phone booth while he sits in a car wash that never ends.