Starring Ian Holm, Bruce Greenwood and Sarah Polley. Directed by Atom Egoyan Rated R, profanity, nudity, adult themes Running time 110 minutes Jack gives this film a rating of 10 out of 10

(Dec. 25, 1997) -- If L.A. Confidential is the year's most satisfying film, The Sweet Hereafter is its most devastating, a film of such subtle and understated emotional power that you walk out with what feels like a permanent lump in your throat and ache in your heart.

Adapted by Canadian director Atom Egoyan from the novel by Russell Banks, this film is the most disciplined work yet from a filmmaker who previously seemed to embrace the odd, the coolly detached and the idiosyncratic at the expense of accessibility and emotional involvement.

Working with material that could easily have been made manipulative and melodramatic, Egoyan instead finds the hidden pain beyond the obvious agony of this film's characters. He takes this examination of a community confronting its worst nightmare and makes it something both specific and universal.

Working with a collage-like approach to time, Egoyan reassembles Banks' plot, bouncing backward and forward in the story to capture resonances that might have been missed had it been told in linear form.

Banks' novel was a series of monologues that essentially told the same story, from different perspectives: of the life in the small, upstate New York town of Sam Dent, before and after a school-bus accident kills almost all the town's children.

Using essentially the same plot and characters, Egoyan transposes the town of Sam Dent to British Columbia. He then shifts time effortlessly, as different characters examine their lives in the wake of unimaginable sorrow.

Key among them is Mitchell Stephens (played by the incomparable Ian Holm), a liability lawyer who wants to represent the parents of several of the dead children in a class-action suit. Money, he tells them, is not the point -- nothing can bring back lost children and money won't fill that void. But someone must be held accountable and liable: "Let me represent you in your anger, not your grief," he tells them.

The parent most resistant to Stephens' entreaties is Billy Ansell (Bruce Greenwood), a widowed father of twins who was driving behind the bus when the accident occurred and who watched it happen, unable to prevent it. The past, he believes, is now a zone of pain. To continually be forced to relive it through a series of unending lawsuits will only serve to destroy what little is left of the town's sense of community.

Finally, there is Nicole Burnell (Sarah Polley), cheerleader, popular student and victim of her father's sexual longing. The only student to survive the bus crash, she has been paralyzed by the accident and will spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. Stephens hungers to contrast her golden-girl potential against the handicapped future with which the accident has left her.

Still, if the film has a focus, it is the tortured lawyer Stephens, played with remarkable restraint by Holm in the role of his career. Egoyan shows us the source of Stephens' legal fury: his own sense of loss at the fact that his daughter is now a drug addict beyond his control, who only calls him to tap him for a few dollars and push the button of paternal guilt.

Egoyan's construction of the story means that the accident itself isn't shown until the film is almost halfway done. A stunning long shot of heart-wrenching inevitability, it plays out like a nightmare viewed from a distance -- but a distance that cannot diminish its cruel power.

He overlays the story with snippets of Robert Browning's The Pied Piper of Hamelin, which takes on an eerie, foreshadowing quality. At various points, different characters become the Pied Piper; the promise of something better, of somehow recapturing what's been lost, is too tantalizing for most of these characters to resist.

As Stephens, Holm should be a shoo-in for an Oscar, after a lengthy and varied career as a character actor. His performance here is a marvel of unspoken but deeply felt emotions. He is matched by the direct but vulnerable qualities of Polley as Nicole and the intensity of Greenwood as Billy.

The Sweet Hereafter sounds like an incredible downer but, in fact, is an amazingly moving experience, built from beautifully realized cinematic efforts. It's hard to imagine a film better than this one this year.