Snow Falling on Cedars
Directed by Scott Hicks
Starring Ethan Hawke, Youki Koduh, Rick Yune, James Rebhorn, Max Von Sydow
    and James Cromwell.
available on video
*  *  1/2    (Two and One Half Stars)
no time to read the whole review?
THE JIST of MY PROSE
A visually sumptuous but extremely thin film. Beautiful and independent in it's approach to telling a story - it tells a poor one, uninterestingly. Don't mute it to soak up the cinematography, though - the score is quite lovely.

         This is interesting. Scanning down the list of films I saw in 1999, I can scarcely
retrieve a title that experiments more with the language of cinema itself than ‘Snow
Falling on Cedars’. The wonderful cinematographer Robert Richardson, whose best work
this is, brings to life the haunting imagery of the elements - and lulls them into the land of
dreams. This is a film of enormous meandering, both in it’s script and it’s magnificent
editing. It’s strange that even obvious examples like ‘Being John Malkovich’, ‘The Blair
Witch Project’ and even ‘Magnolia’, though all of them better films, are only innovative
in their approach or their material. Scott Hicks’ film is one that, very much like ‘The
Thin Red Line’ of two years ago, encircles the parameter of a narrative and attacks at all
sides, shaping a three-dimensional object, soft and mannered to compose something
engaging, powerful and flawed all at the same time. Of course this film isn’t nearly as
successful as ‘The Thin Red Line’ at making it’s composition transcend the very nature
of film and become something unique in the hundred year history of it; but ‘Snow Falling
on Cedars’ has all and none of the  potential to do so - at the very same time.

         My biggest gripe with the film is how it’s so unbelievably breathtaking as a
spectacle and so hardly interesting or moving as a film. The story, which alternates from
being a “racially-forbidden love story” to a “racially-charged courtroom drama”, never
becomes anything more than a white-shaming match, characterizing everyone in the film
as either a “victim Jap” or a “bad white person”. A story about a fisherman who may or
may not have been killed by a Japanese farmer (Yune), the farmer who just happens to be the
husband of sad and bitter Ethan Hawke’s first and only love (Kudoh) - is contrived and told with a
very, very small range of emotion; roughly : brooding, victorious smiling, the “beat that”
courtroom look and finally, the all-important “this is injustice!” look. Obviously I’m
being facetious to state my point, but let’s face it : this kind of melodrama always seems
to fail because the audience is nearly told to pity the protagonists and examine their own
hearts. Only when the audience can make it’s own decision, like ingresses such as ‘The
Sweet Hereafter’ and ‘The Insider’(off the top of my head), will sed audience feel real
emotion.

         I saw a film by a fellow student in a documentary class, just this year, that
explored some of the same themes, ie : the racial prejudices stemmed from our
internment of the Japanese after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. It framed it’s facts
and opinions around just how offensive the maker found another film in which the
Japanese are interred to camps, Alan Parker’s ‘Come See the Paradise’, to be. I felt the
documentary had a really pushy, almost finger-waggling feel to it. The whole thing also
had such an uninteresting visual schematic, I almost ignored it entirely. It was one of
those student works that reeks of personal stories, voice-over and all the other things that
make a short documentary so amateurish. ‘Snow Falling on Cedars’ works the same way
in it’s overall account, but with beautifully composed sensory images that occasionally
bring a boil to a scene that’s just cold water. This is a film that stays with us like a
narcotic - turning our ordinary settings into dreamy fantasies of rectangular, organized
artfulness.

         And there’s really little else to say about this collection of montages encompassed
by a movie. The performances are almost left out of the film, displaced by it’s longing to
make the issue speak for itself. In turn, all that happens is the following : the issue speaks
too loudly, drowning out any hint of a need for good acting at all giving the audience
little choice but to relax in the hazy, hallucinatory world where James Newton Howard’s
soft, graceful score can wrap it’s aural majesty around the stunning overall majesty of the
exterior of a film with no interior.

 Faberge Egg - hollow and ornate.
 

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