Snow Falling on Cedars

dir. Scott Hicks

"I know the day. It was May 30, 1986 -- I know it because it's my wife's birthday," says Scott Hicks. "And I just saw this little story about a pianist passing through town who was recovering from some difficulty he'd had and was on his way east. He'd recently married, and I just said to [my wife], 'Look, I've got to go and see this....'"

Ten years later, Australian director Hicks would find his curiosity about a newspaper item, and his subsequent creative exploration of it, overwhelmingly rewarded. The international success of Shine, his award-winning film about the emotional destruction and rebirth of classical musician David Helfgott, brought Hicks dizzying acclaim after 20 years of filmmaking, and became a sensation from which it sounds as though he is still reeling.

"Sundance [Film Festival] was the first audience in the world that had seen the film. We had barely finished it on time," Hicks explains. "I was in mortal terror that no one was going to turn up for this movie.... Then in the screening you just felt the audience move into its thrall, and I was like, 'Wow, this is really working.' I mean, I'd had no way to measure it before that, and with the eruption that happened at the end I thought, 'Well, this has happened; everything's going to be different from now on.' And I felt extremely glad that I was the age I was [Hicks was in his early 40s at the time]; that I wasn't some 25-year-old film school graduate. Mostly, I adhere to the view that you get better at what you do; you learn and keep learning...."

The learning curve has certainly continued for Hicks. Whatever its flaws, Snow Falling on Cedars, his latest release, is the vision of a mature filmmaker. As adapted by Hicks and Ron Bass from David Guterson's best-selling novel, Cedars, though woefully cumbersome, is a visually triumphant romantic drama that reflects a serious attempt to deal with several different levels of love and regret.

An island in the post-WWII Pacific Northwest is the setting for a murder trial that reunites reporter Ishmael Chambers (Ethan Hawke) with Hatsue Miyamoto (Youki Kudoh), the great love of his young life, who was sent to a Japanese American internment camp and now suffers beside her accused husband, Kazuo (Rick Yune).

Hicks has created a truly stunning visual design for the story, weaving burnished memories into every gorgeously wounded frame. With the extraordinary help of production designer Jeannine Oppewall, editor Hank Corwin, and especially the director of photography, Robert Richardson, Hicks manages to show the inevitable weight of the past upon the present.

"The whole film is a sort of journey toward the truth about each of the several mysteries within it," he says. "So each shot has its own little search for the truth in it. What you see at first is not necessarily what you get. [The audience] is always looking through slats of a fence or past the curtain of a fogged-up window that looks out into the snow, so you have layer upon layer upon layer within the image. There's always something between us and the subject. The whole thing is about seeing more clearly."

What fells the film is its lack of a compelling center; it starts to bore you without anyone to carry its consuming passions. Smoking around its edges are intriguing details about the appalling treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II, but the romance that supposedly burns beneath all the pain of history is as remote as the hollowed cedar tree that acts as a touchstone for its lovers. Hawke, always a narcissistic actor, engenders no feelings of warmth for the essentially selfish Ishmael. Even with fine supporting turns from Sam Shepard and a crafty, wizened Max von Sydow, the film doesn't ground our sympathies. Hicks, for his part, doesn't see that as problematic.

"Our notions of love are so simplistic. Of course [Hatsue] loves him, but she's actually made another choice, and she stands by that choice. That doesn't mean that she doesn't love Ishmael. That, in a sense, is the revelation I hope for him -- that he always has that," he says, then laughs, reflecting. "Like Humphrey and Ingrid [in Casablanca] always have Paris. They'll always have the cedar tree."