SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS (director/writer: Scott Hicks; screenwriter: novel by David Guterson/Ron Bass; cinematographer: Robert Richardson; editor: Hank Corwin; cast: Ethan Hawke (Ishmael Chambers), James Cromwell (Judge Fielding), Richard Jenkins (Sheriff Art Moran), James Rebhorn (Alvin Hooks), Sam Shepard (Arthur Chambers), Max von Sydow (Nels Gudmundsson), Youki Kudoh (Hatsue Miyamoto), Rick Yune (Kazuo Miyamoto); Runtime: 126; 1999)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
What I didn't need was Australian director/writer of "Cedars," Scott Hicks ("Shine"), to tell me what a bad thing the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was for a little over two hours of a darkly photographed film and then precede to bore me to death with a glum romantic/courtroom drama, that never got untracked, but seemed so proud of itself for being so politically correct in taking a stand against bias. All the film's great social themes and plays on morality, were too docile and too manipulatively inflated to hold my interest.
The film is set in the Pacific Northwest of Washington, in an island fishing village in the early 1950s, where the weather was either misty or snowing. The first part of the film, just stagnated, as uninvolving flashbacks filled the screen and uninteresting storytelling techniques prevailed, without fleshing out the reality of the characters except to see them in wooden terms.
A fisherman is found dead, entangled in his net and the sheriff who discovers the body suspects foul play. Through flashbacks at the trial that visually move back and forth from present to past, we learn that the fisherman was a childhood friend of Kazuo Miyamoto (Rick Yune), who is being accused of the murder because he was the last one on the boat with the fisherman and had a motive for killing him. He is a decorated Japanese American war veteran, whose family was to buy land from the fisherman's white family but missed their payments when Miyamoto's family was sent to the detention camp for the remainder of the war. He is now asking his childhood fishing partner to consider going against his mother and sell him the land. The fisherman's mother was bias against the Japanese because of Pearl Harbor and sold the land to a white farmer, returning to the Japanese family all the money they put into the land for payments.
Into the picture, in the middle of a snow storm, the reluctant hero of the film, Ishmael Chambers (Hawke), smelling a story that intrigues him, as he is now a reporter on the same paper his father was a crusading-editor (Shepherd), who sought justice for the Japanese Americans during WW11, reminding his readers that they are our neighbors. Ishmael had fallen madly in love with Kazuo's wife, Hatsue (Youki Kudoh), as a teenager when they grew up so close to each other, but she sent him a "Dear John" letter after her mother urged her to only marry a Japanese boy, when she was in the camp and he was fighting in the South Pacific.
At the trial, ponderously played, featuring various forms of flashback: we see a fair-minded judge (Cromwell), a one-dimensional bigoted D.A. (Rebhorn), and the defense attorney Gudmundsson (Max Von Sydow), who tries to steal every scene he is in with his sometimes melliflous and other times doddering spiel in defense of Kazuo, bringing up a corny liberal argument against prejudice, and finally telling the court humanity itself is on trial. Von Sydow reflects the opinions of the author of the popular novel the film is based on, David Guterson. Everything seemed so contrived, the film had no fresh air to breathe, the cinematography was darkly uninspiring, the courtroom seemed to be staged only as a reason to give the filmmaker his chance to applaud himself for being so free of bias.
The kicker to the story comes from Ishmael, when he decides to come to terms with the bitterness of being rejected by Hatsue and he turns over to the court in the nick of time evidence he had discovered of her husband's innocence. Everything seemed so mechanical: the acting, the story, and the directing; everything was so dutifully right, the film left me asleep in the cedars, as I was unable to see what the fuss was about in telling Americans that their country shamefully put Japanese Americans in internment camps during the war. What's the surprise? Don't they teach that in the high school social studies courses anymore?
REVIEWED ON 8/2/2000 GRADE: C
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
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