Snow Falls On Cold Hearts
By Kimberly Chun

Can a major Hollywood movie revolving around an interracial love story and the Japanese American internment experience be a box office smash?

A story that sold millions of copies in book form, David Guterson’s best-selling novel Snow Falling on Cedars makes a less than fluid transition to film. Directed by Scott Hicks as his follow-up to the Academy Award-winning Shine, the film is elegant and ambitious, yet flawed and over-awed.

Set on an island north of Puget Sound post-World War II, the story follows Ishmael Chambers (Ethan Hawke), a reporter covering the trial of a Japanese American fisherman, Kazuo Miyamoto (Rick Yune), the husband of Chambers’ secret childhood love, Hatsue (Youki Kudoh).

Like many of the other white residents of the island, Chambers initially believes the evidence is stacked against Miyamoto, the last person to see a fellow fisherman whose family benefited from the internment. But after soul-searching and detective work, Chambers uncovers the truth.

Unfortunately, inertia is at the heart of this story. Chambers is a man paralyzed by his past. Snow Falling on Cedars is chock full of scenes of him staring helplessly at Hatsue while Hatsue gazes anxiously at her husband, ad infinitum. Chambers watches helplessly as she is interned during the war, he becomes emotionally frostbitten after their romance chills, and he is finally immobilized by the objectivity he clings to as a reporter.

But Hicks complicates an already complex tale with an avalanche of flashbacks and spastic edits that will undoubtedly induce confusion and paralysis in the audience as well.

The imagery is expressively gorgeous. Rainwater drips off curling ferns, waves tumble against rocks, and children’s lips meet amid more, omnipresent water.

The northwestern landscape is bleached of all color and rendered as starkly black and white as an old photo: It’s all mysterious fog, austere wet wood and swirling snow.

The historical details are also right. The scenes of the Japanese Americans walking down a dock gangplank to be barged to Manzanar, with tags pinned to their chests and surrounded by luggage, tug at the heart and ironically tap into the same power of images of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island.

And the scenes of the newly married Hatsue and Kazuo Miyamoto struggling to quietly consummate their union behind a flimsy curtain at the internment camp are full of careful specifics -- a swing record, crammed quarters and bare bulbs.

But the story’s self-conscious aestheticizing of murder and romance feels chilly and distanced. Perhaps Snow Falling on Cedars needed less jumpy edits and simply more editing.

Where there could have been only one scene of Hatsue writing a Dear John letter to Chambers from Manzanar, there are two. Sure, Hicks makes a point: She tells her lover “I loved you and at the same time I didn’t love you” because she feels split, as many American hyphenates are, between immigrant tradition and her U.S. upbringing. But Hicks hammers home that point repeatedly until one feels tempted to charge him with assault.

Instead of paring the story down to narrative essentials a la The English Patient, Snow Falling on Cedars breaks down in a pile-up of extraneous scenes that may have built mood in the novel but seem redundant and indulgent on film.

Will this movie make the internment’s shameful moment in U.S. history palatable to mainstream movie audiences? This viewer feels divided.