Comment

jerfairall
Nov 26, 2014jerfairall rated this title 3.5 out of 5 stars
I had to re-check the Banks novel to confirm my suspicion that the PIED PIPER stuff was Egoyan's doing, and indeed it was. It makes for an uncomfortable bit of moralizing on the director's part--so, the bus accident happened to punish the citizens of the town for their various transgressions? There's no diluting the power of the material, though, and for every miscalculation (Caerthan Banks' unconvincing performance is unfairly hamstrung by her horribly stilted dialogue), Egoyan manages a number of indelible images: I haven't forgotten the early scene of Sarah Polley strumming her cover of Jane Siberry's brilliant "One More Colour" onstage at a near-empty fairgrounds or a haunting shot of a pocketknife held beside a toddler's head in the seventeen years (!!) since I first saw the film, and they've lost nothing of their power.