For all its beauty and complexity, Snow Falling on Cedars moves at the pace of a snail making its way through a puddle of glue.
Once again, top filmmaking talent (director Scott Hicks of Shine, writer Ron Bass of Rain Man) takes good material (a bestselling novel by David Guterson) and turns it into a numbing snoozefest.
I offer this small proof of the movie’s sleep-inducing properties:
Last night, my wife and I sat down to watch the two-hour video after we’d tucked our three children into bed. About an hour into the film, our daughter came down the stairs and said, “I can’t sleep.” Mrs. Grouch cleared a space on the couch and muttered, “Here, sit down and watch this—it should do the trick for you.” In a matter of minutes, little Grouchette’s eyelids were fluttering and her head was drooping toward her chest.
In all fairness, when I sit down to watch a movie like Snow Falling on Cedars I know better than to think I’m in for a thrill-a-minute white-knuckler. Those lingering close-ups of raindrops dripping slooowly off fern leaves are a dead giveaway. I have nothing against those kind of arty nature-as-metaphor shots inserted in movies (one of my all-time favorites, Days of Heaven, is filled with them), but I lose patience with arty-for-arty’s-sake when it comes at the expense of well-paced storytelling.
The story buried inside Snow Falling on Cedars deserves better than this. It’s a genuinely intriguing tale of love, mystery, racism and raindrops on ferns. Carl, a fisherman on Washington’s San Pedro Island, is found dead—drowned and tangled in his own nets. A serious head wound on the corpse leads the sheriff and coroner to believe that this was no accident. Carl, it appears, was murdered and suspicion quickly focuses on Kazuo Miyamoto (Rick Yune), another fisherman, who had a long-standing grudge against Carl's family over a plot of land. The story of Kazuo’s courtroom trial is set in the years just after World War Two, when anti-Japanese sentiment still ran high.
Emotion does run high and cleaves the small town in two as the prosecutor (James Rebhorn) clashes with Kazuo’s attorney (Max Von Sydow) over what eventually comes down to a trial about “humanity, integrity and decency.” Covering the courtroom drama from a balcony seat is the town’s newspaper editor, Ishmael (Ethan Hawke). His impartiality is tainted by the fact that his high school sweetheart, Hatsue (Youki Kudoh), is now Kazuo’s wife. Rather than paying attention to testimony, he spends most of his time staring longingly at the back of her head and drifting off into flashbacks of when he and Hatsue romped among the raindrops as children.
This is where your eyelids will probably start to flutter.
With its frequent flashbacks, overlapping dialogue and Discovery Channel close-ups, Snow Falling on Cedars is about as non-linear as they come. We move in and out of the story’s chronology at random—often, our only clues to where we’re at are the weather and the age of the actors playing Ishmael and Hatsue. I honestly didn’t mind the back-and-forth structure of the film and found it crucial to the way the movie forces us to look at events from many different perspectives.
What I did object to was the amount of time devoted to these detours from the trial. How many times do we have to see the teenage lovers kissing in the rain-drenched forest before we say, “All right already, they were in love—we get it”? How many times do we have to watch the crowds of Japanese-Americans being herded off to the World War Two internment camps before we say, “All right already, our nation did some really atrocious things back then—we get it”? How much strain can we put on our patience until it snaps like an overstretched rubber band?
Hand a pair of scissors to the fellow in the editing booth and be done with it!
It nearly breaks my heart to give Snow Falling on Cedars bad marks because this is a film that has so much going for it: good acting, a beautiful score by James Newton Howard and the most breath-taking cinematography (Robert Richardson) I’ve seen in more than a decade.
There’s a very good movie somewhere inside Snow Falling on Cedars, struggling to break free of its coma. I would like to see that movie—a taut, thought-provoking mystery.
Unfortunately, all we’re left with is an artsy-fartsy patience-tester.
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