Snow Falling on Cedars

viewed August 20, 2000 on VHS   Full Details

It is disheartening to discover how poorly this beautifully composed film was received by critics when it came out last winter.  I am particularly troubled because it is the kind of thematically thoughtful and visually alluring filmmaking I aspire to create; the kind that requires a miracle to succeed with American audiences.  And whereas I think director Scott Hicks undershot the outstanding potential that his material promised for the big screen, I don't agree with the dismissive comments the film has received: boring, meandering, lacking tension.  Hicks made an earnest effort to examine, with sobriety and patience, the effects of a subtle but pervasive anti-Japanese sentiment on a small fishing town in the Pacific northwest.  

His narrative technique is so thrilling that one can forgive him when its complexity slips through his fingers. He weaves a dazzlingly intricate tapestry of flashbacks (many of them are literally mere flashes that offer symbolic suggestions of people's subconscious preoccupations) into stoic courtroom scenes, doing his best to infuse a tired movie setting with some visual originality.  This technique echoes that used in The Thin Red Line, with which it also shares much visual beauty and clarity of symbolic imagery.  At times it also seems to share the effect of experiencing a collective consciousness -- a narrative spoken by the citizens as a whole about their town, recalling the collective soldier's voice that dominated Terrence Malick's masterpiece.  

This is where the film loses its clarity, because it can't seem to penetrate enough into the more interesting half of the community, the Japanese.  Hicks certainly reveres them, to a fault, depicting them as ruddy-faced, hard-working males and submissive, snow-skinned ladies.  The grizzled white men of the town are hooligans in comparison, and one conniving white woman is put forward purely for the audience's scorn.  Hicks espouses liberal white guilt in the place of a nonpartisan depiction of his Asian Other.  (Ethan Hawke, supplying his standard mournful expressions, doesn't help matters much -- he's become a face easily associated with a class who hate themselves for the advantages they wield over others.)  What makes it worse is that the guilt is wrung further by suppressed sexual desire for the Asian Other, as seen in the protagonist's rebuffed love for his Japanese childhood friend.  The resolution of the film is a dismissible pat-on-the-back of liberal altruism that sidesteps the seething distrust that had seized the town for the greater part of the story. 

In spite of the unresolved themes of the film, the beauty of images and complexity of narrative make this a very compelling story to watch.  If a film is going to fail, it should do so as beautifully as this one.

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