Snow Falling on Cedars Review

by Michael Dequina (twotrey AT juno DOT com)
December 25th, 1999
_Snow_Falling_on_Cedars_ (PG-13) *** 1/2 (out of ****)

Ethan Hawke may topline the credits of this adaptation of David Guterson's highly-esteemed novel, but neither he nor anyone else in the cast can lay
claim to being the "star" of the film. That title belongs to
director/co-scripter (with Ron Bass) Scott Hicks, who has crafted a lushly
evocative mood piece that has everything to do with sense and emotion as it
doesn't with traditional plot-driven satisfactions.

Of course, there is a story here, and the primary one revolves around the
1950 trial of Japanese-American Kazuo Miyamoto (Rick Yune), who is charged
with murder. Kazuo is married to Hatsue (Youki Kudoh), whose heart truly
belongs to the caucasian Ishmael Chambers (Hawke), who runs the local
newspaper in the Pacific Northwest community of San Piedro. They have been
in love ever since they were children, but anti-Japanese sentiment during
the WWII-era--culminating in her family's incarceration in the internment
camp of Manzanar--tore them apart.

There are more secondary character touches, such as Ishmael's struggle with
living up to his father's (Sam Shepard) legacy as a newspaperman, but all of
the narrative comes secondary to the depth of feeling Hicks, cinematographer
Robert Richardson, and composer James Newton Howard are able to convey
through imagery. For a two-hour-plus film, _Snow_ is startlingly short on
dialogue, relying on sight and sound to tell the story for extended
passages. It's said that a picture says a thousand words, and the images in
the film speak a lot more about the emotion of the piece than any scripted
lines. This is best exemplified by the central Ishmael-Hatsue romance;
Hawke and Kudoh barely share any screen time, but one can feel the longing
between them to the point of heartache. The story eventually catches up and
converges with the atmosphere in the end, making for the perfectly
transcendent conclusion to this beautiful work of art.

Michael Dequina
twotrey@juno.com | michael_jordan@geocities.com | jordan_host@sportsmail.com | mrbrown@iname.com Mr. Brown's Movie Site: http://welcome.to/mrbrown
CinemaReview Magazine: http://www.CinemaReview.com
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