Snow brainer

Cedars makes its case

by Peter Keough

SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS. Directed by Scott Hicks. Written by Hicks based on the novel by David Guterson. With Ethan Hawke, Youki Kudoh, Max von Sydow, James Cromwell, Sam Shepard, James Rebhorn, Rick Yune, and Eric Thal. A Universal Pictures release. At the Holiday and Showcase cinemas.

Of all the arts, film is perhaps best equipped to mirror the way the mind works, the overlapping play of memory and imagination, desire and regret. Film is also the most commercial of arts and the most expensive to produce -- which is why not many movies fulfilling that potential get made. One that did is Snow Falling on Cedars, Scott Hicks's adaptation of the David Guterson bestseller. On the surface a courtroom drama set in the Pacific Northwest shortly after World War II, it is -- like a number of other 1999 films, including The Limey, Three Kings, Being John Malkovich, and Magnolia -- an ambitious, mostly successful attempt to prevail over mainstream movie conventions and expectations.

It is also true to its staid but well-crafted literary source. Set in 1950 on the significantly named Amity Island off the Washington coast, the story begins when fisherman Carl Heine (Eric Thal) is found drowned in his net, his skull split open. The chief suspect is Kazuo Miyamoto (Rick Yune), a Japanese-American whose father was in the process of buying some land from Carl's father before Pearl Harbor changed everything and Amity Island's Japanese community was rounded up and transported to the infamous Manzanar concentration camp. In a vain attempt to show loyalty, Kazuo signed up, served in Europe, and was decorated. But when he returned home, he discovered that the Heines had sold the land for a profit, leaving Kazuo, his beautiful wife, Hatsue (striking newcomer Youki Kudoh), and their young children at a loss. And so when Carl is found dead, circumstantial evidence and latent racism point to Kazuo as his killer, and he goes on trial, defended by the doddering but shrewd barrister Nels Gudmundsson (Max von Sydow in one of the finest performances of the year).

Watching the proceedings is Ishmael (Ethan Hawke, who's starting to look a little like Darren in Bewitched but fits this role well), who unlike Ahab (Guterson has a weakness for ponderous allusion) is missing an arm, not a leg, and is obsessed with a woman, not a whale. An embittered veteran, he runs the local paper he inherited from his crusading father (Sam Shepard, naturally) and is covering the story. Perched on the upper gallery in a courthouse that recalls that of To Kill a Mockingbird, he peers through the bar-like balustrade with a furtive and more than professional intensity.

For there is more to the case than just the bare facts. The film's initial image is of a lantern barely cutting through dense fog, and that light will be the key to the mystery in more ways than one. But before that resolution, Hicks plunges beneath the surface of the story with multi-layered montages, interweaving points of view, and fluid, interlocking flashbacks, such as the ones that show us Ishmael's forbidden love for Hatsue. Drawn together as children, they secretly met for walks on the beach and woods, avoiding discovery not so much by Ishmael's liberal father as by Hatsue's mother, who mistrusts white people -- an attitude confirmed with the outbreak of war and the brutal relocation camps. This background is related in brief glimpses and extended sequences sparked presumably by key moments in the trial and shown presumably from Ishmael's point of view, but the overwrought train of associations gets derailed with flashbacks within flashbacks, points of view within points of view that confuse matters rather than deepening them.

Yet at other times Hicks's promiscuous use of memory shudders into an eloquent clarity, as when a simple drumroll (the James Newton Howard soundtrack is evocative, though it can be intrusive) accompanies the stark round-up of Japanese-Americans for Manzanar, in what may be the most aching depiction of that national disgrace on film. And the central montage involving a letter read at three different times melds a grotesque beach landing in the Pacific, innocent love between children, and racist rage into an overwhelming five minutes that accomplishes everything Terence Malick attempted in The Thin Red Line.

"Fucking Jap bitch," Ishmael concludes as his arm is dumped into a bucket, and the words are tragic. This is no simplistic tract against injustice, no pretty series of postcards (though cinematographer Robert Richardson does offer more than enough of the title conifers) backdropping a melodrama. Cedars aspires to shed a light on the reality behind glossy conventions and clichés, on how people hate and love and remember. And its challenges are more than rewarded.

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About that fog . . .

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