|
Past
and Present
By Pat Aufderheide
Snow Falling on
Cedars
Directed by Scott Hicks
David
Guterson's 1995 novel Snow Falling on Cedars is a gripping story
of a death that might be murder and a trial that might be a miscarriage
of justice. It's also an interracial romance between an Anglo- and a Japanese-American,
situated in an historical moment of great intensity--Pearl Harbor, Japanese
internment, D-Day and the aftermath of World War II. One empathized even
with the ugliness and fear in the book's characters. The choices that
lay at the heart of the novel were not rendered as tendentious, didactic
or moralistic, although they dealt with subjects such as racism, guilt
and injustice. They were decisions you could imagine facing.
 |
|
Youki Kudoh
and Ethan Hawke. |
The film, directed by Scott Hicks (Shine), is a rare example of a movie you can like if you loved the book. It's also a rare case of top-echelon Hollywood production and technical talent applied to ends worthy of their creativity. It evokes strong characters, and perhaps more remarkably, captures the complexity of the novel's layered set of revelations that explain what happened and why. On a small island off Washington State, whites and Japanese fish and farm together. One day, a white fisherman turns up dead. Suspicion turns on the Japanese fisherman who last saw him. Since the murdered man's family had taken back land sold to the suspect's family during the World War II internment, a motive seems clear. The local newspaperman might be able to sleuth out the answer. But as the childhood lover of the suspect's wife, does he want to?
In Snow Falling on Cedars, the past doesn't just shape the present, it is a constant part of it. The central character, Ishmael (Ethan Hawke), recalls how he lost his arm in the war. The memory of nearly drowning in the tropical surf--a memory that echoes with the suffocating sense of panic he is living through as the trial progresses--crosses with a memory of an idyllic beach moment with his childhood love, Hatsue (Youki Kudoh), whose husband is now on trial for murder. Scriptwriter Ron Bass (who also adapted The Joy Luck Club) expertly uses the evocative power of emblematic moments or gestures to build the texture of the plot. Ishmael and his father, the local newspaper publisher (Sam Shepard), observant chroniclers helpless to intervene, watch as their mortified Japanese neighbors shufflingly march to their destination at the Manzanar internment camp. It's a grim echo of an earlier scene, filmed from the opposite direction, of a festival parade.
Director of photography Robert Richardson often uses extremes--closeups, vistas--that put the viewer into an unexpected relationship with the image. When he combines this with an Ansel Adams-like fascination with natural surfaces and objects, it elicits a respect, even a kind of awe, for the Northwest environment--the ocean, the huge trees, the snow blanketing the forests--and lends a simple heroism to these people's struggle to be decent in the face of racism, internment, war and murder.
On another level, this is a story about growing up. In the process of the murder trial, Ishmael must finally come to terms with his wounds and scars from both romance and war. His choices and challenges parallel those of the society around him, also wounded and scarred and also charged with responsibility. There are times when the weight of these themes can make the movie lumber along, and there are characters who suffer disproportionately. Max Von Sydow plays the film's resident wiseman, as the accused man's lawyer, and he's given a character who's part Yoda and part Gregory Peck from To Kill a Mockingbird. He does the best he can with lines like "Every once in a while ... ordinary people just like you get called on to give the report card for the human race," but even his abilities are taxed. Most of the time, though, Snow Falling on Cedars steers with dignity around sentiment and banality.
|
In These Times ©
1999
Vol. 24, No. 3 |