Snow Falling On Cedars

Herald Rating: * *

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Sam Shepard, Max von Sydow, Youki Kudoh, Rick Yune

Director: Scott Hicks

Rating: M (violence offensive language)

Running time: 130 mins

Opens: Now showing, Village. Hoyts cinemas

Review: Peter Calder


From its opening frames, this adaptation of David Guterson's elegiac 1994 novel is drenched in a sense of place. In America's Pacific Northwest, off the fictional island of San Piedro, Japanese settlers fish the same waters as the descendants of white, mainly German, pioneers.

Hicks (Shine) and DOP Robert Richardson (who has lensed much of Oliver Stone's work) depict the region with such clarity that we can almost smell the silver fish flapping on grey decks as white mist creeps across black water.

It makes you want to rush out and book a ticket for Seattle. But when the movie (Hicks and Ron Bass wrote the screenplay) starts getting to grips with the story it almost immediately falls apart.

The novel is a series of flashbacks from the 1950 murder trial of Kazuo Miyamoto (Yune), a young Japanese-American accused of killing a local fisherman on his boat.

On the press bench is Ishmael Chambers (Hawke), a reporter who was a teenage sweetheart of the defendant's wife, Hatsue (Kudoh).

The flashbacks interleave the childhood romance, land deals which turned sour with the wartime internment of Japanese-Americans, Ishmael's service in the Pacific and memories of his father (Shepard) a crusading editor whose legacy is the young reporter's biggest burden.

Meanwhile, the murder mystery unfolds in court and outside it, as Ishamel comes across crucial evidence.

Such a complicated structure suits the reflective reading process, but Hicks and Bass have made a film which replaces the ruminative tone of the novel with what amounts to a long act of violence on the viewer.

The movie is all sudden cuts and studied fadeouts, and employs a particularly irritating - not to say confusing - device of overlapping soundtracks from different scenes. And James Newton Howard's loudmouth score inflates the whole thing to bursting point.

Everything's there - if anything Hicks and Bass are far too faithful to the original - but it all seems to be happening at once and you feel like holding on to the edge of your seat.

Amid all this busy cinematic contrivance the actors struggle to breathe, though to their credit they do so well enough. Von Sydow's defence lawyer is a special treat, making a great fist of a summing-up which - significantly - is observed in a long uncut close-up. It's as fine a forensic monologue as you'll see anywhere and it's a precious and singular memory.