Film Review: Snow Falling on Cedars

Scott Hick's Snow Falling on Cedars is a beautifully crafted film but not a good Asian American film. The film is based upon David Guterson's best selling novel about a triangular entanglement among a white newspaperman and a Japanese American women and her husband wrapped around a murder. Hicks however reduces the story's focus solely to the moral dilemma of the journalist, Ishmael, played by Ethan Hawke.

The movie builds on a mystery slowly peeled away. Set on post-World War II San Piedro Island (modeled after Bainbridge Island, I believe) off Seattle, the scences are often snow-filled, half seen, conveying the layers that the story unravels. Its tableaus seem near-Asian in portraying the beauty of the northwest. Rick Yune's Kazuo Miyamoto, is a returned soldier and fisherman accused of killing another fisherman. Ishmael discovers evidence that would dispel his guilt but is paralyzed by his past relationship with Hatsue, Kazuo's wife, played by Youki Kodou.

Movie adaptions, as this one does, necessarily fail novels in their inability to convey the written story's depth even as they occassionally suceed in being true to the spirit. Even in this failure, the film succeeds better than previous films in evoking the pain of Japanese Americans in assembling for the trip to the internment camps during World War II and portraying the persistent racism that pervades much of San Piedro's white community.

It fails fatally in how it distributes its attention to character. While Hawke's Ishmael is a fully realized person, Kodou's character is stunted after the girl reaches womanhood. After that, she functions simply as stoic backdrop to Ishmael's struggle to overcome his obsession and bitterness toward her. And Kazuo? Well, he's one-dimensionally inscrutable.

It was telling that the opening credits lsited few Asian American actors. As the lights came up in the theatre, I overhead a movie patron nearby marvelling at "how mcuh he (Ishmael) loved her," so for him, like most of the audience, the movie was about him (you know, the white guy). The fact is the novel was not about him but about the three of them, two of them Japanese-American, one who was accused of murder, anohter whose family lost all their property, went to the camps and was caught in the middle of another injustice. Whether for the sake of commerical viability or conditioned amnesia to the Asian American characters, the film focuses on a lesser pain and greater chauvinism.

This is a film worth seeing, but in this day and age, we deserve to see a better one.