Waterland is a 1992 film directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal, based on the 1983 novel of the same name by Graham Swift. The film starred Jeremy Irons, Sinéad Cusack, Ethan Hawke, and John Heard.
Waterland follows the story of a mentally anguished high school history teacher (Irons) going through a complete reassessment of his life. His method for reassessing his life is to narrate it to his class and interweave in it three generations of his family's history. The movie portrays the teacher's narrative in the form of flashbacks to tell the story of a teenage boy and his mentally challenged older brother living on the fens of England with their widowed father. The entire movie is motivated by an opening scene in which the history teacher's barren wife (Cusack) steals a child from a supermarket and believes it to be hers. The teacher explains to his class how he and his wife carried out a teenage romance which led to a disastrous abortion that mutilated the girl's womb and left her infertile. The teacher is tortured by the guilt of this act as well as the jealousy he demonstrated to his older brother when he suspected his girlfriend's child was that of his brother. The girlfriend explains
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