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 whom he may soon lose permanently to drug abuse. 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 thwart and punish her parents, especially her sexually abusive father. 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.
DOWNLOAD 400MB
No comments:
Post a Comment