Product: Snow Falling on Cedars (2000)
Rating: 1.0
Utter rubbish
Director Scott Hicks drenches his film adaptation of David Guterson's novel in torrents of lovely but perfectly meaningless lyrical imagery, perhaps believing that empty MTV-style visual splendor can serve in place of the human drama in which this movie is so spectacularly lacking. More like participants in a music video than flesh and blood human beings, the actors seem to have been persuaded that striking melancholy poses and exchanging soulful looks are the best ways of delineating character. All turn in dramatically inert performances, particularly Ethan Hawke as the conflicted journalist involved in the murder trial of a Japanese-American. Of course it would have been difficult for even the most accomplished actors to do otherwise, given the flimsy, hackneyed script, with its embarrassingly simplistic treatment of a complex historical event. As is usual with Hollywood movies dealing with racial discrimination, the focus here is not on those who actually suffered the injustice, but on the white spectators, whose sympathy for the victims we are asked to applaud. The Japanese American characters in this film--portrayed as infuriatingly docile and helpless, like some higher species of domestic pet--are present merely as adjuncts to the drama of guilt and redemption taking place among the white characters. Can you tell I really hated this movie?