(out of
four)
By David N. Butterworth
For a big-budget studio film, there are a lot of art house pretensions in Scott Hicks' Snow
Falling on Cedars. Artistic shots of young lovers catching raindrops on their tongues
in the bowels of a tree, or making out behind dimpled glass. A non-linear narrative
structure so complex that you could be excused for thinking the lead character (played by
Ethan Hawke) actually stumbles across himself washed up on a beach, many years
older and ravaged by war. An intricate, distracting soundtrack abuzz with overlapping
dialogue, babies wailing, wind and rain beating down on an old creaky courthouse, all set
to strings that swell and swell some more.
And snow. Lots of it, some of which falls on timbers.
Fans of David Guterson's best-selling novel will probably wish that Hicks, the director
of Shine, would just shut up and get on with the story.
That story is a post-World War II courtroom drama cum love story
set in the high country of Washington state where the cedars touch the sky and everything
is blue and gray (except for the occasional red of the women's lipstick). The courtroom
drama results from the death of a local fisherman and the accusation of a Japanese
landowner for his murder. The love story is one from the past: how a local reporter named
Ishmael Chambers (Hawke) once loved the accused man's wife (Youki Kudoh). This all
transpires in a time and a place when anti-Japanese sentiment was at its zenith.
Earnest, handsomely mounted, and empty, Snow Falling on Cedars takes a difficult
chapter in this nation's history–how the United States interned thousands of
Japanese-Americans in concentration camps following Japan's attack on Pearl
Harbor–and forsakes a lot of hard questions in the process. Max von Sydow's defense
attorney does, however, deliver a darned good closing argument as this two-hour film draws
to a close. Hicks knows it, and doesn't cut or pull back for a second.
It's a rare moment of truth in a film that exploits its cinematic
strengths–exquisite photography, manipulative music, and a fractured narrative
style–at the expense of honest storytelling. Von Sydow is magnificent in this scene.
Magnificence, alas, is a quality that Snow Falling on Cedars strives, yet fails, to
achieve.
