Plot
Life is difficult in a small town in British Columbia, Canada in the wake of a terrible school bus accident in which numerous local children are killed. Hardly able to cope with the loss, their grieving parents are approached by a lawyer, Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm), who wants them to sue for damages by claiming the bus was faulty. Stephens is aware that urging for a class action suit while the town is so aggrieved is ethically questionable, but persists anyway. He is meanwhile haunted by his dysfunctional relationship with his own adult daughter, a drug addict. At first most of the parents are reluctant to sue, but eventually they are persuaded by Stephens that filing a class action lawsuit would ease their minds and also be the right thing to do.
As most of the children are dead, the case now depends on the few surviving witnesses to say the right things in court. In particular, it is 15-year-old Nicole Burnell (Sarah Polley), who was sitting at the front of the bus and is now paralyzed from the waist down, whose deposition is all-important. Before the accident, Nicole was a budding country music prodigy and she senses that her parents want justice and a large cash settlement to replace her lost music earnings—and not necessarily in that order. In the pretrial deposition, she unexpectedly accuses driver Dolores Driscoll (Gabrielle Rose) of speeding and thus causing the accident. When she does so, all hopes of holding the bus company liable vanish along with the possibility of a big settlement. It is implied that Nicole's motivation was partly to punish her father, who was sexually abusing her. Those involved know that Nicole is lying but can do nothing. The trial never occurs, leaving the townspeople, and Stephens, to cope in other ways with the uncertain future.
Read more about this topic: The Sweet Hereafter (film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)