Snow Falling on Cedars

A film set on an island in Washington state. The year is 1954. San Piedro island lives by fishing. A fisherman is found dead. On his boat, in the net. A man is arrested. Kazuo Miyamoto is a Japanese American born on the island. The trial begins. Ishmael runs the local paper. He sits in the courtroom and takes notes. He has one arm. He lost the other in the war. From there the film runs two times at once. The past is the forties. Ishmael and Hatsue grew up together as children. They meet in the hollow of a cedar. Nobody knows. Then the war comes. After Pearl Harbor the Japanese American families on the island are rounded up. They are sent to camps. Hatsue goes too. She marries Kazuo in the camp. She writes Ishmael a letter. In the present Hatsue is the defendant's wife. The matter in the trial is land. The Miyamoto family bought a field years ago from the dead man's family and could not keep up the payments because of the camp. The land was taken back. What the narrative is interested in is not murder but prejudice: its idea is that the case runs not on evidence but on a ten-year account on the island. Ishmael has a document. A harbour record he found could clear the defendant. He keeps it back for a while. The narrative does not condemn that hesitation but shows it plainly. The snow keeps falling. The island is cut off, the power fails, and the trial goes on. The source is David Guterson's novel. Robert Richardson shot it and the film was nominated for the cinematography Oscar. The telling is fractured. The flashbacks are made not by cutting but by association, and that is what it was most criticised for. Scott Hicks directed. Ethan Hawke, Youki Kudoh, Rick Yune, Max von Sydow and James Cromwell are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes courtroom drama and visually strong films. Who it is not for: anyone looking for straight telling; the shifts in time are frequent and the narrative becomes hard to follow in places.