'Snow' falls on New Haven with much moisture

By Ann Ritter

It feels like you've stepped into a parallel dimension when you watch the new film Snow Falling on Cedars. It's a universe that looks a lot like one you've seen before, but only in postcards and Ansel Adams photographs. It's also a distinctively American landscape, where slinky silver fish are netted from oily-black water, women cry one tear at a time, and everyone walks around looking deeply and importantly pained in the way that only beautiful movie stars can.

COURTESY UNIVERSAL PICTURES Ethan Hawke plays the strong, silent, mute type.

The film, based on David Guterson's best-selling novel of the same title, explores what it means to be an American and the amazing capacity that people have to be awful to one another. A dead fisherman is found tangled in a net off the coast of a small town in the Pacific Northwest in the years immediately following World War II. The population of the town, split almost down the middle into Japanese-Americans and whites, reacts (in typical American fashion) with horror and racial scapegoating. A fisherman named Kazuo Miyamoto (Japanese pop star Rick Yune, making his film debut) is accused of the murder. Ethan Hawke plays reporter Ishmael Chambers, a war veteran who had his heart destroyed years ago by the defendant's wife (played by Youki Kudoh). The story is about pain and redemption, mostly the former, but director Scott Hicks, in his first film since 1996's Shine, handles his characters' loneliness in an almost delicious way. Emotional hurt in Snow Falling on Cedars is beautiful, touching, and inescapable, while (most of the time) managing to transcend melodrama.

While the acting and scriptwriting are both solid, the visual impact of the film is, without a doubt, its strongest attribute. Weather and ambiance are used to mirror and define the emotional experiences of the characters in the film, and the cinematography is uniquely beautiful. The film's depiction of the landscape of the Pacific Northwest during America's pre-Starbucks era is breathtakingly close to perfect. Fog and snow, as reflected by the black waters near Puget Sound, are used heavily throughout the movie to conjure up a dark, murky feel of an unfair trial in a prejudiced town. These shots stand in stark contrast to the joy depicted in childhood flashbacks to bright green forests and Norman Rockwell-hued parades celebrating the town's annual harvest. Nature acts as a sensual contrast to the harsh nature of the fear and animosity between the residents; the snow sticks to eyelashes and makes faces rosy, the rain mats hair to dewy young foreheads, and the smell of cedar and strawberries permeates all good things in the town.

Ethan Hawke stares off into the distance a lot. He, like the rest of the film, is very pretty and melancholy. He plays his role effectively, although one could argue that there weren't many more emotions for him to play other than "sad." In almost every scene, he carries himself like a man who, having just gotten over a long cry, realizes that absolutely everything is even worse than he thought it was in the first place. He manages to look both collapsed and hollow at the same time, carrying with him the aura of someone whose soul was violently removed a long time ago, but for whom the wound will never fully heal.

The film contains only sparse dialogue. Because of this, the film gets a bit dull and slow at times, and the visuals can sometimes verge on sentimentality. Still, in spite of its shortcomings, Snow Falling on Cedars is remarkable because it manages to succeed where millions of other pretentious art-house films about human frailty have crashed and burned. Yes, these characters are sad, quiet and liquid-eyed, but it reflects their emotional depth instead of acting as a cheap surrogate.

There are no scenery-chewing performances in this quiet postcard of a film; in some cases the scenery consumes the actors. The only magic in the film occurs visually—without it, the movie would only be a litle better than average. That said, it's worth noting that the look of Snow Falling on Cedars is miraculously ethereal in a way that no other film in the past year, or even the past five, has been.

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