Product: Snow Falling on Cedars (2000)
Rating: 5.0
Romance, Murder, and Post-Pearl Harbor Race Relations
With the serene backdrop of snow (a metaphor for recovering the purity and innocence of youth)lightly falling on majestic cedars, this work is an awesome example of cross-genre writing: although presented as a murder mystery, its deeper tale is about the nobility of love and resisting hypocritical racial peer pressures. Playwright and actor Sam Shephard, the father of less-than-war-hero Ishmael Chambers (played by Ethan Hawke), is the noble newspaper man who resists Japanese race-baiting in the wake of Pearl Harbor.Max Von Sydow is perfect as a, well, brilliant defense attorney nearing death; on his last legs, he says irreverent things a younger lawyer wouldn't, and even the judge has to pay attention. The acting is uniformly excellent, down to the falling of tears which parallels the same graceful trajectory as the snow. Indeed, given the constraints of the marketplace, and what it sets out to do, this is a perfect film. It combines the tried and true (for example, flashing back from a courtroom case to reveal the plot), with the new (using the murder mystery itself as a hook to explore the recent history of race relations). The forbidden love affair between the American boy and the Japanese girl makes this work also a kind of tragic romance on the model of Romeo and Juliet, but with prodigious race relations rather than more local familial feuds providing the barrier. In the end the film is more literary than knock-down bang-'em-up, more about race and time and rebellious puppy love than murder or storybook romance. But in my mind that's a good thing. And despite the slow-sounding title, I doubt many will be bored.