Snow Falling On Cedars
(1999)
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Australian director Scott Hicks's Snow Falling on Cedars is far removed from the character-driven, pure storytelling of his previous movie, Shine, and a comparative plunge into moody atmospherics. Action insinuates itself through the director's determined eye for watercolour composition and free-floating perspective, like random shoots of new growth in an overwhelming rain forest. It's impossible to be complacent as a viewer because Hicks's meditative style paradoxically forces one to locate and make the story happen internally. The approach makes good aesthetic sense in that the story, based on David Guterson's bestselling novel, couches courtroom drama in dreamy textures, and Hicks is determined to reflect that even if it means turning an audience's idea of narrative on its head. The director gets a lot of help from the weather in the Pacific Northwest: the setting is one of Washington State's San Juan Islands, where rain embraces earth and sky in a singular, introverted personality. There, a Japanese American war hero (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) stands accused of murdering a white fisherman in the years following World War II. His wife (Youki Kudoh) is the former childhood sweetheart and lover of a local newspaperman (Ethan Hawke) whose bitterness over the loss--as well as his helplessness during the internment of Japanese Americans, and the crusading legacy of his journalist father (Sam Shepard)--prevents him from coming to the defence of the accused man. Layered emotions, layered sensations, layered clouds. This is historical fiction of a sort that works best as an experience of time's relativity: flowing, stopping, trickling. Ironically, the film's most commercial element, the trial, is the least interesting aspect, though old pro Max Von Sydow makes those scenes great fun as a wily defence counsel. --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com |
It's rare to experience an adaptation of a novel as true to the spirit of the original as director Scott Hicks's follow-up to the Oscar-winning Shine. David Guterson's book is vivid, poetic and sensual, qualities this film, about prejudice within a small fishing community in the years following the Second World War, shares in abundance. Ethan Hawke plays a local journalist fascinated by the trial of a Japanese-American war hero accused of murdering a fellow fisherman. The trial becomes the focus for fear and scapegoating in a mixed-race community torn apart by Pearl Harbor. Hicks sacrifices narrative thrust for atmosphere, resulting in a slow but very special and beautiful film.
Halliwell's Film Guide
A slow-moving drama of smalltown racial prejudice that lingers on landscapes as much as on the individuals caught up in a courtroom drama of a familiar kind.