Posted: 01/12/2000

Snow Falling on Cedars

(2000)

by Doug White

Scott Hicks delivers a stunningly beautiful but flawed adaptation of David Guterson’s novel.

By dim light of lanterns (one fastened to a mast, the other carried), we see the shadowy figure of a man adrift on a small fishing boat in dangerously thick fog. Long tones from the boat’s foghorn slowly bring another form out of the murk: a Japanese man holding a gaff, his face unfriendly.

More than a dramatic hook, this opening hints at what Snow Falling on Cedars has in store for us: at its best, a visually arresting story whose dimensions shift as appearances are called into question and troubled personal remembrances drift in search of acceptable communal and historical reckoning.

The film is set on San Piedro, an island near Washington’s Puget Sound. In 1950, the film’s present, local fisherman Carl Heine (Eric Thal) is discovered dead. Implicitly with careless and possibly bigoted haste, Kazuo Miyamoto (Rick Yune), fellow fisherman and Carl’s boyhood friend, is put on trial for murder.

This early sense of injustice makes the subsequent murder trial resonate in the community as a bitter reminder of a greater injustice committed during the war. In response to the attack on Pearl Harbor, San Piedro’s entire Japanese population was forcibly relocated to a concentration camp. As a result of the internment, since they were unable to make two final payments, the Miyamoto family lost their land. With cruel irony, this loss becomes the prosecutor’s strongest evidence in establishing Kazuo’s motive to kill Carl.

In the film’s most powerful flashback sequence, we see a Japanese family stripped of its most personal possessions, driven down the town’s main street in a humiliating parade, and put on a boat, where one woman, apparently embarking on a vacation, cheerfully waves shoreward as dozens of Japanese nearby stand devastated.

Part murder mystery, courtroom drama, love story, and war movie, Snow Falling on Cedars (adapted from David Guterson’s novel) uses such flashbacks to expand the scope of judicial inquiry, asking us to consider many unresolved personal, family, and community experiences related to the internment and war.

The ambivalent Ishmael Chambers (ably played Ethan Hawke) is the film’s central character and unlikely hero. Though a journalist, Ishmael mostly seems disengaged as the murder trial unfolds, watching from the courtroom’s second-floor gallery. As witnesses testify, Ishmael discretely glances at the accused man’s wife, Hatsue (Youki Kudoh), perhaps expecting to meet her gaze.

In elegaic flashbacks, we see that Ishmael and Hatsue secretly were teenage lovers, meeting on the sly in the cedar forest. Uncomfortably sitting in proximity to Hatsue during the trial, Ishmael is haunted by the loss of their relationship, which Hatsue ended by letter during her internment.

Ishmael is also haunted by the loss of his father, from whom he inherited an independent newspaper. During the war, despite death threats, Arthur Chambers (a small role brilliantly played by Sam Shepard) bravely published editorials against the internment of San Piedro’s Japanese. His influence on Ishmael is obvious in a scene in which the father fondly teaches his son how to run the printing press.

Trying to sort out his losses, Ishmael reminds himself that: “Facts you can cling to. Emotions just float away.” Unable to follow his father’s bold example - despite explicit encouragement to do so - Ishmael nevertheless makes good his own adage by uncovering crucial evidence.

Unfortunately, by having Ishmael discover evidence, the filmmakers needlessly increase his importance in the story, marring the plot with a hackneyed device worthy of TV melodrama. As a result, the film sells short at least one character. In retrospect, in light of Ishmael’s discovery, defense lawyer Nels Gudmundsson appears inept, which compromises his status in the film as a voice of conscience. (That director Scott Hicks casts Max von Sydow in this role and actually alludes to the actor’s famous chess-playing knight in The Seventh Seal suggests that lawyer Gudmundsson’s credibility is intended to be of the highest order.)

Still more troubling is that, while the film gives respectful attention to Ishmael (his inner struggle, his heroic discovery), most of the Japanese characters are stereotypically represented as humbly pained victims. Apart from two flashbacks of Kazuo (in one practicing Kendo with his father, in the other confronting Carl’s mother), we mostly see the Japanese in passive and silent groups, stoically enduring, sometimes expressing gratitude to the white men who aid them.

These flaws are very regrettable since Scott Hicks (Shine, Arkansas) and his team have made a film of remarkable visual beauty, often devising brilliant stylistic means to keep the film’s complex themes in view from scene to scene. At the San Piedro docks, for example, as the Japanese are being put on the boat, Hatsue’s face is momentarily reflected in the same car window through which Ishmael is watching; a startling juxtaposition that emphasizes the fragility of an intimacy that was obstructed from being public and is now about to be lost.

Among the supporting actors, Rick Yune effectively invests Kazuo Miyamoto with proud distress, Youki Kudoh manages Hatsue Miyamoto’s apologetic restraint, Celia Watson stands out as the mean-spirited Etta Heine, and Richard Jenkins make one wish more was made of Sheriff Moran.

The films of John Sayles (Matewan, Limbo, but especially Lone Star) are an excellent standard against which to judge films that show how personal relationships bear the larger weight of social history. Compared to these, Snow Falling on Cedars is a good film that sometimes substitutes idyllic imagery for dramatic integrity.

Doug White is a writer and filmmaker who lives in southern California.

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