There are two potentially enthralling stories vying for attention in Snow Falling on Cedars.
One is a To Kill a Mockingbird courtroom drama with racial overtones and the second is a Romeo and Juliet love story.
Journalist Ishmael Chambers (Ethan Hawke) is covering the trial of Kazuo Miyamoto (Rick Yune), a Japanese fisherman accused of murdering an American fisherman.
It's barely a decade since Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbour and the subsequent internment of hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans.
The inhabitants of San Piedro, a little island community in Puget Sound, still mistrust one another, so it's not a given that Kazuo will get a fair trial.
This is a particularly painful story for Ishmael to be covering because Kazuo's wife Hatsue (Youki Kudoh) is the only girl Ishmael ever loved.
The war made it impossible for them to be lovers because Hatsue was sent to a camp, where she met and married Kazuo.
Snow Falling on Cedars is told through a series of flashbacks from the courtroom to the night of the mysterious death, the war years and to the more idyllic but strained time when Ishmael and Hatsue fell in love.
Director Scott Hicks has serious problems with focus.
It's never clear whether the trial or the thwarted love affair is the film's centrepiece.
The viewer can concentrate on the trial and the way an aging lawyer (Max Von Sydow) manoeuvres through prejudice and innuendo to uncover the truth, not only of what happened that fateful stormy night, but why Kazuo and his supposed victim were antagonists to begin with.
There is no question David Guterson, who wrote the novel, was inspired by Gregory Peck's kindly, righteous lawyer from To Kill a Mockingbird. Von Sydow's performance is as moving, and even more subdued, than Peck's Oscar-winning performance.
The courtroom scenes have the same leisurely feel as Mockingbird, with James Rebhorn playing the bigoted prosecution lawyer with wonderful haughty disdain.
Too much attention to the trial detracts from the effectiveness of the love story and the angst Ishmael feels at having loved and lost and never knowing why.
Ishmael is the thread that binds the two halves of the film, because he is in possession of information that could prove Kazuo's innocence.
Every performance in Snow Falling on Cedars is restrained. Kudoh and Yune are playing inscrutable Asian inscrutably.
There needs to be some balance, but it doesn't come from Hawke, Von Sydow or James Cromwell as the trial judge and Sam Shepard as Ishmael's father.
The film's real assets are Robert Richardson's cinematography, Jeannie Oppewall's production design and James Newton Howard's haunting score.
Combined, they create a shimmering feel that makes the story seem as if it is taking place in a snow globe.
It all seems so beautiful and distant.
That may work marvellously for the visuals, but when the performances are as cold and ethereal as the landscape, it prevents the viewer from becoming a participant in the love story or the murder mystery.
(This film is rated AA)
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