Product: Snow Falling on Cedars (2000)
Rating: 2.0
STRIVING FOR WHAT IS RIGHT
I expected so much more from this film. While it was visually stunning and had many lovely actors in it, I felt deflated and disappointed by it. The film drove the viewer to expect something dramatic and telling to happen, but it doesn't. The film is overly long, slow-moving and offers no real surprises. I did not read the book upon which this is based, so I was not sure what the plot was. I suspect the book was a lot better than the film. The story surrounds a town's bitterness toward the Japanese following World War II and one man's feelings for a Japanese girl. Ethan Hawke is subdued but good in his role as the one man who can prove the innocence of the Japanese girl's husband in a court case but also the one man who has the most to lose personally by doing so. Hawke's character, as a boy in the Pacific Northwest, meets the Japanese girl. They become the best of friends and eventually they share a kiss together. It is never clear if their relationship went beyond this point, but it is safe to say that Hawke's character loved the girl. However, all the Japanese families were being shipped off to internment camps, and he and the girl were no longer able to see one another. While in the camps, the girl met a Japanese-American man (who served in the war also) and married him. Hawke also served in the war and loses an arm in battle. Hawke's father (played by Sam Shepard) is a free-thinking newspaper publisher, and he is one of the few who uses his voice and paper to criticise the policy of interning the Japanese. Soon, advertisers are pulling their support of his paper, and he is left to try to print the paper alone. Hawke becomes a journalist because of his father. Ultimately the values his father taught him about standing up for what is right and decent are what leads Hawke to gather the evidence needed to keep the Japanese girl's husband from being convicted of a murder for which he was being framed. In the end, Hawke's heart is still broken, but he has done the right thing.