Wonderful character development!

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Blistering performances.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

It's 1950s Washington State. Fisherman Carl Heine's body is found. Japanese fisherman Kabuo Miyamoto is accused of the murder. Sheriff Art Moran (Richard Jenkins) and prosecutor Alvin Hooks (James Rebhorn) lead the prosecution. Nels Gudmundsson (Max von Sydow) is the defense lawyer. Judge Fielding (James Cromwell) presides over the court. Ishmael Chambers (Ethan Hawke) is the only reporter in this small town. He's a returning vet with only one arm who still loves Kazuo's wife Hatsue from his childhood. In flashbacks, Ishmael and Hatsue struggle against war paranoia. Ishmael's father Arthur Chambers (Sam Shepard) is hounded for supporting the Japanese in his newspaper.It's got the snowy romantic moody atmosphere. However it lives too much off of it. The murder mystery is given short shrift. While watching the movie, I kept wanting the case be presented in a coherent way. The romance, the operatic style, and the prejudice are important but they keep getting into the way of the trial and investigation. This needs a short section where Sheriff Moran explains the case against Kabuo in a neat tidy package.

This film is a travesty against it's source material - being one of the finer works of fiction from the 90s - and should be avoided by any and all who have read the novel. The wonderful cinematography aside, the film fails to deliver in nearly every aspect. Wooden acting; a script as stilted and predictable as a Louis L'Amour novel; and a lack of subtlety so apparent, it might as well be a PSA against racism all weigh heavily against this waste of film stock. Furthermore, and in collusion with the above statements, far too many liberties were taken with the novel to fairly call this a translation of the original. It merely preserves the strongest theme of novel - racism - and runs over the rest. Finally, the sex scenes present in the book are washed over so as to satisfy a PG13 rating, but these were absolutely pivotal to the understanding the characters and their motivations.

This movie is so slow that I had time to figure out each and every plot twist. Art does not have to be boring. The director Scott Hicks is trying real hard to be Ingmar Bergman and he fails badly. I believe in watching a film from the beginning to the very end but I really wanted to walk out of this one half way. The scenes are all so slow that you have time to figure them out and jump the the surprise twist before it happens. All the interesting bits are shown in jump cuts and the dull bits are left on the screen until you want to scream. If you want to see an interesting movie with lots of snow go to Fargo. A friend of mine walked out and asked me the next day how it ended. I asked her go guess. And she told me her what she thought the ending was. And she was right! "Bad art is bad for the soul." Oscar Wilde

This is probably the worst movie I have ever seen in my life, and the first video rental that made me and a buddy push the fast-forward button more than three times. When you have two religious viewers show the most emotion when a character swears at his former love while losing a limb, you know the movie is really bad. Snow falling on cedars has way too many shots of snow actually falling on cedars. And snow falling on the ground. And people talking like they are watching snow falling. Soooo boring. Believe me, it is much better to simply sit in front of your apartment window and watch the snow actually fall then to waste money renting this movie.