(1997) A small Canadian community, torn between grief and anger, following an accident with a school bus involving the deaths of several children, is visited by an out-of-town lawyer, Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm). In director/writer/producer Atom Egoyan's harsh, bleak, depressing drama of trauma (seeing it once is enough), adapted from Russell Bank's novel, tragedy makes "everything strange and new."

Mr Stephens - who throughout receives cell-phone calls from his daughter Zoe, a drug addict scheming for money - urges the decent, respectable members of the town to file with him for a class-action lawsuit. Taking a room at the Bide-a-While motel, he begins with the owners, Wendell and Risa Walker (Alberta Watson), who lost their son Sean in the crash; after dismissing some of the parents as thieves and inbreds, they recommend he next speak with Wanda and Hartley Otto - hippies who adopted their Indian son Bear, model citizens who don't attend church, a college-educated couple involved with crafts in their A-frame home.

Reluctant to speak with the lawyer, the Ottos hesitantly let Mr Stephens into their home. "That's why I'm here," he says to them, "to give your anger a voice." Someone cut a corner, he explains, using a cheap bolt: "I do know what's best." He promises to pursue the bus manufacturer, "who is responsible for this tragedy, … and make them pay ... not just for your anger, but for the future as well." When the case of negligence is won, he will receive one third of the anticipated million-dollar award.

On the morning of the crash, December 6th, Billy Ansell (Bruce Greenwood), a widower, was as usual driving behind the bus in his pick-up truck, waving to his twins waving back from the bus's rear window. As she had for fifteen years, Mrs Dolores Driscoll (Gabrielle Rose), whose husband is confined to a wheelchair following a stroke while she's wearing a neckbrace during the interview, was driving her children, as she thought of them, on an icy road when just after she'd picked up "like berries" Sean Walker, "a strange little guy" who cried and sat next to Nicole Burnell (Sarah Polley), she hit a patch of ice and lost control.

Nicole, who had dreams of becoming a singer/songwriter, had been reading the story of the Piped Piper to Billy's twins the night before - "the mountainside shut fast. Did I say all? No, one was lame" - while their father was once again in a motel room with Risa, to whom he says later: "I serviced the bus; there was nothing wrong with it." Before Nicole left the house, Billy gave her some of his wife's clothes; on the bus she was wearing a sweater that had belonged to Mrs Ansell.

On the day Nicole returns home from the hospital, now her daddy's crippled girl, a computer for doing her homework and composing her songs is waiting for her, compliments of Mr Stephens; Sam Burnell (Tom McCamus), who has a younger daughter Jenny (fortuitously ill on the fatal day) and wife Mary, had plied Nicole's innocent, tune-filled fantasy to lure her into his cave of coercive consent.

Needing Billy's testimony that Mrs Driscoll was not driving recklessly, Mr Stephens says: "I can help you." "Not unless you can raise the dead," replies Billy, then threateningly: "You leave the people of this town alone." "Let me direct your rage," coaxes Mr Stephens, trying again (thinking of his daughter as his cell phone rings): "We've all lost our children."

Leaving Mr Stephens, Billy heads over to see Sam and Mary, asking them to drop the case; Sam refuses: "You know how much we need the money."

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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