SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS (Universal) Starring: Ethan Hawke, Youki Kudoh, Rick Yune, Max von Sydow, James Rebhorn, James Cromwell. Screenplay: Ron Bass and Scott Hicks, based on the novel by David Guterson. Producers: Frank Marshall & Kathleen Kennedy and Ron Bass & Harry J. Ufland. Director: Scott Hicks. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (sexual situations, adult themes, violence, profanity) Running Time: 127 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Several months ago, upon hearing that David Guterson's much-respected novel _Snow Falling on Cedars_ was being turned into a film, I made my usual effort to familiarize myself with the source material. After approximately 90 pages, I did something I almost never do: I surrendered. The grinding pacing of the story -- which, at the point I lost interest, had consisted almost entirely of a court proceeding -- did absolutely nothing to motivate persistence. Whatever intriguing themes might have been contained in Guterson's tale would never be known to me thanks to a narrative decision I considered crippling: waiting far too long to get to the point.
This background is offered to make it clear that my ambivalence towards Scott Hicks' SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS has nothing to do with affection for the source material. It also sets up the problem with the film, which is the same problem I had with the novel. The story begins in 1950, in a fishing village on an island off the coast of Washington state. A murder trial is beginning, in which Japanese-American fisherman Kazuo Miyamoto (Rick Yune) is accused of killing another fisherman with whom there was a history of family dispute. Reporter Ishmael Chambers (Ethan Hawke) is covering the trial, but his interest is more than merely journalistic. In flashback, we learn of Ishmael's youthful romance with Hatsue (Youki Kudo), who will become Kazuo's wife. Their love affair is thrown into turmoil, by the "relocation" of Japanese-Americans during World War II, an act of discrimination the implications of which carry into Kazuo's trial.
It's not the first time the screen has seen a story of lovers separated by the Japanese-American internment camps (Alan Parker fumbled the similarly-themed COME SEE THE PARADISE), but that doesn't mean it's not an important story to tell. In fact, SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS has an angle on the often-didactic issue of racism that makes it potentially compelling. Ishmael faces a moral choice when he discovers information that could exonerate Kazuo, a choice complicated by his own feelings of hatred. Those feelings, however, are not some easily dismissable bigotry. Instead, they're a churning mixture of Ishmael's tangled feelings about his father (Sam Shepard), a controversial liberal publisher; about the loss of an arm in the war; and about his lingering obsession/revulsion towards Hatsue. While the prosecutor in Kazuo's case (James Rebhorn) engages in none-too-subtle race-baiting, Ishmael's own brand of less overt racism makes it harder to watch with smug superiority.
Unfortunately, by the time it's clear how Hicks and co-screenwriter Ron Bass are trying to personalize the murky matter of racism, the film is almost over. That leaves a film with two glaring flaws. The first is Ethan Hawke's performance as Ishmael, which is so blank that the role might just as easily have been played by a cardboard cutout. Hicks does a nice job with Ishmael and Hatsue's secretive adolescent trysts inside a hollow tree, but he doesn't do much to help us understand Ishmael's longing. Hawke plays most of his scenes with a thousand-yard stare we're expected to interpret as a combination of introspection and repressed emotion, while it could just as easily be interpreted as trying to remember where he left his car keys. By the time Hicks tries to crank up the drama by cranking up James Newton Howard's score during a wildly overwrought sequence involving Hatsue's "Dear John" letter, it's too late to give the relationship the sense of consequence it demands.
The second problem is the directorial self-indulgence exemplified by that "Dear John" sequence, which shows up at every possible wrong time. There are quiet moments in SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS when the mournfully personal manages to escape -- Kazuo and Hatsue sharing a wedding night in the internment camp separated from her family only by a curtain, or the always-segregated school bus suddenly missing its Japanese-American passengers. Too often, however, Hicks either ladles on the symbolism (Hatsue in a convoy to the internment camps reminiscent of her parade as the town's "Strawberry Princess") or lets speeches tell his story (fixing on a close-up of Max von Sydow as Kazuo's defense attorney, summing up for the jury how "humanity itself is on trial"). There's too much film-making business going on for too long, and too little of the human story that should intensify the historical story. I didn't surrender on the film version of SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS. I merely walked out unsatisfied, wondering why the story, like bad journalism, had to bury the lead.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 snow dazes: 5.
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