Product: Snow Falling on Cedars (2000)
Rating: 3.0
Glossy coffee-table book, but not a great movie
The photography is very good. The landscape is nothing short of gorgeous. The dreamy style and constant snow/rain create quite an effective moody atmosphere. Ethan Hawke does a decent job playing the local newsman. These are what the 3 stars are for.While the story is riveting, it's not particularly intriguing. To make a good movie out of this story, it has to take lots of good acting, thought-provoking screenplay and sensitive direction. Unfortunately, the movie does not quite have these few elements.1) The acting is kind of minimal. By that I'm not saying the actors are bad necessarily, but just that probably they don't have sufficient opportunities to make their characters come alive.2) The characters' dialogues, over all, do little more than is required to make a tangible story. There are some "speeches" about fairness and justice (Ishmael's (Hawke) father's lecture to his son, and the closing argument of the defense attorney (von Sydow)). But they are like more intended to hammer the "lesson" into the audience's heads than to let us get a deeper view of what the characters are psychologically going through.3) As many previous reviewers have commented, there are just way too many flashbacks. I know that to link the past history to the current event, some sort of flashback is good. But it gets to the point of annoying when there's a flashback every 3 minutes or so. And to repeat what a reviewer has said, the voiceover of the reading of the love letter written by the Japanese girl is just terrible. I just don't get the point.I don't know if the director tried to make this movie an epic. But if so, he failed quite miserably. Attempts were made to deal with many diverse issues: prejudice, love, wars, parenthood, etc. But the development of these issues relied too heavily on flashbacks. As a result, there're many stand-alone flashbacks, with some totally unrelated to another. There's not so much of a thread linking all these coherently. Also, some flashbacks are a bit shallow. Sometimes I can't help feeling that they're there just to show off the beautiful photography. Narcissism? Or being too pretentious? Hmm... and the score sometimes sounds too "grand" and "overstating."If you're the kind of person who has the mood for listening to light classic in a coffee shop while watching it rain outside, probably this movie would suit you the way a nice coffee-table book would. You know, sometimes you just want to let yourself indulge in the mood for a bit. But if you're expecting to see a true classic/epic/exciting drama, you'd better look elsewhere.