#snow falling on cedars

[qvotable]

We’ve known each other forever- I can hardly remember not knowing you. It’s hard to remember the days before you. I don’t even know if there were any.

David Guterson; Snow Falling on Cedars

[fatecanberewritten]

It's my destiny now to love you.

David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars

[e-b-reads]

Books of the Month: Oct 2023

If I consistently make these posts halfway through the next month, they're no longer late, that's just the posting schedule now. Anyway, I read some books in October (including Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party on Halloween itself, because I had the day off and thought I should read something nominally seasonal). Here are a couple that I recommend:

Our Wild Farming Life: Adventures on a Scottish Highland Croft (Lynn Cassells, Sandra Baer): This is one of those books that you can likely only find by 1) somehow already knowing about it (via British television, I guess) or 2) wandering through the nonfiction section in your local library and deciding it looks interesting. (Guess which I did!) It is a nonfiction book about the two authors (occasionally the first person narration makes it clear that Lynn was the main one actually writing the book) buying a farm in Scotland and making it work! I enjoyed this book because it was clearly a book written by someone who can write fairly well but not super lyrically or anything, and who loves what she's writing about. Lots of things to appeal to me - they balance a love for nature and a desire to do everything sustainably with a respect for the local farming community - but I think it is worth reading for others as well!

Snow Falling on Cedars (David Guterson): This one I found in a Goodwill. It was interesting to read because I did read it once before, in maybe early high school, and remembered very little. And what I did remember is enjoying the older jaded veteran character; but on this read, he's actually not far from my own age and while "jaded" still describes him, I think a better word is "depressed." Anyway, a good book about a small, maritime community (so again, things I that I specifically like) and how people are very complicated. The main "present day" setting is a 1950s murder trial, with flashbacks to WWII and the internment of Japanese-American citizens. But the ending also suggests that, despite their complications, many people are basically good, and I appreciate that, too.

[lobbycards]

Snow Falling on Cedars, German lobby card. 1999

[marnz]

I missed out on reading a lot of ““classic”” canon novels due to chronic childhood illness so i am trying to read them now. I finally started Snow Falling on Cedars, I’m about 7 chapters in. I’m reserving all my thoughts on the plot and the themes. What I do have thoughts on: The Pacific Northwest Atmosphere and history, baby! It makes sense the author lives on Bainbridge because wow did he nail the feeling of the San Juans. I’m obsessed with the strawberry farms detail. There’s a rare strand of strawberry, the Marshall Strawberry, that grows super well here and was the main industry on Orcas and Bainbridge Islands in the 1930s and then was decimated by disease in the 1940s. I so appreciate this attention to historical detail!!! btw the Marshall Strawberry is making a comeback. foodies pay attention, this James Beard’s fav strawberry.

[not-over-troydyer]

Ethan Hawke interviewed at the Toronto Film Festival, 1999.

[dreaming-of-texel]

Tonight, he knew, was what old-timers called ghost time, with fog as immobile and dense as buttermilk. A man could run his hands through such a fog, separating it into tendrils and streamers that gathered themselves languidly once more into the whole and disappeared seamlesly, without trace.

Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson

[schlock-luster-video]

Happy birthday Japanese actress Youki Kudoh! Here's some Mystery Train art to celebrate!

[scatteredbookthoughts]

3/17/24

Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson

Just finished this today - my thoughts are mixed. I loved so much of the mood, the way Guterson captured the brooding isolation of the PNW in winter, the details about fishing and the characters' lives.

But it also struck me that, for all that detail, Guterson has very little to say about the experiences of Japanese American families in the internment camps during WWII - something that should have been very central to the story. We learn about Ishmael Chambers' experiences in the war, but Hatsue Imada's side of the story feels threadbare in comparison. Perhaps Guterson felt it wasn't his place, as a white man, to try to describe that experience?

The result, though, is that the book definitely felt like it belonged to Ishmael. It's really the story of a white man, written around the forced removal of Japanese families from their homes. His is the central emotional arc of the story.

So even though it was beautifully written, I was left somewhat unsatisfied.

[whileiamdying]

FILM REVIEW; Snow Falling on Cedars: Prejudice Lingers in a Land of Mists

''Snow Falling on Cedars'' is an almost heartbreaking example of what can happen when a filmmaker becomes so overawed by his source that he confuses dramatic storytelling with the production of mammoth coffee-table art books. Bathed in deepening shades of snow-lit Prussian blue, this screen adaptation of David Guterson's popular 1994 novel is admirably high-minded and visually gorgeous but fatally anesthetized by its own grandiosity.

Frame by frame the movie, directed by Scott Hicks (of ''Shine'') and filmed by Robert Richardson (the virtuoso cinematographer behind several Oliver Stone movies), isn't just a series of shots but a sequence of exquisitely balanced photographic compositions. The piling on of so much visual beauty, however, only contributes to the sense of the movie as a frozen artifact cut off from the real world and designed to be viewed from behind a glass casement.

There's a lesson here about the aesthetics of mass-audience movies. Pretty pictures, as nice as they may be, are finally no substitute for a living, breathing screenplay. And ''Snow Falling on Cedars,'' like many an elegant coffee-table book, has a skimpy text (by Mr. Hicks and Ron Bass) that too often substitutes distilled, poeticized oration for everyday speech.

Hardly a moment passes when we're not conscious of the movie's messages about tolerance and forgiveness being shoved in our faces. Even when they are delivered by an actor as gifted as Max von Sydow, playing a defense lawyer who is the movie's official conscience, ''Snow Falling on Cedars'' rings with the hollow boom of a Sunday school sermon.

Perhaps the biggest mistake in translating the novel to the screen was to have the film imitate the book's intricate flashback structure. Flipping back and forth between the present and the past on the page is one thing. (It encourages your imagination to make leaps and allows you to take whatever time you need to bridge those transitions.) But when a movie does the same thing, the imagination is short-circuited, and there is hardly time for reflection. The film is so busy darting back and forth between past and present that from scene to scene its characters barely have time to breathe.

There are also far too many lingering close-ups of haunted faces. And a surreal montage that harks back to the early films of Alain Resnais (specifically ''Hiroshima, Mon Amour''), brings the movie to a dead halt. This might have been a coup de cinema in another film, but here it seems narratively evasive.

The story unfolds as a series of flashbacks from the 1950 murder trial of Kazuo Miyamoto (Rick Yune), a young Japanese-American accused of killing a fisherman on his boat off the coast of the fictitious San Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound. Most of the events are seen through the eyes of Ishmael Chambers (Ethan Hawke), a morose young reporter covering the trial for the local newspaper. Many years earlier Ishmael and the defendant's wife, Hatsue (Youki Kudoh), were teenage lovers who met secretly in the hollow trunk of a cedar tree deep in the rain forest. The affair ends when it is discovered by Hatsue's mother, who is vehemently opposed to interracial relationships.

The film's strongest scenes look back to World War II when the island's Japanese-Americans were interrogated, rounded up and sent to internment camps for the duration of the war. The murder trial revolves around the bitterness surrounding a land deal on which Kazuo's family defaulted while imprisoned. During the trial, the prosecutor (James Rebhorn) blatantly appeals to the local whites' lingering anti-Japanese prejudice in speeches that play on the racist stereotype of Asians as treacherous and inscrutable.

As the movie jumps back and forth in time, we meet Ishmael's late father, Arthur (Sam Shepard), the crusading local newspaper editor who stood up to the anti-Japanese hysteria that swept the community after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Nine years later Ishmael, poring over evidence in the case, decides to strike his own blow for truth and justice.

''Snow Falling on Cedars'' may be dramatically inert, but it is well acted, and it succeeds in sustaining a mood of spellbound reflection. The endless swirling snow, the blue-lit fog and the rain forest with its dripping evergreens evoke a brooding interior landscape where memory and reflection loom solemnly over the present.

But even this mood is undermined by James Newton Howard's bombastic score, which suggests the romantic minimalism of Michael Nyman encrusted with heavenly vocal choirs. The overwrought score is the final lethal touch in a movie that buckles under the weight of its own pretensions.

''Snow Falling on Cedars'' is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has sexual situations.

SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS

Directed by Scott Hicks; written by Ron Bass and Mr. Hicks, based on the novel by David Guterson; director of photography, Robert Rchardson; edited by Hank Corwin; music by James Newton Howard; production designer, Jeannine Oppewall; produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall, Harry J. Ufland and Mr. Bass; released by Universal Pictures. Running time: 130 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.

WITH: Ethan Hawke (Ishmael Chambers), James Cromwell (Judge Fielding), Richard Jenkins (Sheriff Art Moran), James Rebhorn (Alvin Hooks), Sam Shepard (Arthur Chambers), Max von Sydow (Nels Gudmundsson), Youki Kudoh (Hatsue Miyamoto) and Rick Yune (Kazuo Miyamoto).

Snow Falling on Cedars Director: Scott Hicks Writers: David Guterson (novel), Ronald Bass, Scott Hicks Stars: Ethan Hawke, Max von Sydow, Yûki Kudô, Reeve Carney, Anne Suzuki Rating: PG-13 Running Time: 2h 7m Genres: Drama, Mystery, Romance, Thriller

[bookcoversonly]

Title: Snow Falling on Cedars | Author: David Guterson | Publisher: Bloomsbury (2017)

[fatecanberewritten]

Everything comes back to you, nothing is accidental.

David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars

[maxsix]

[lobbycards]

Snow Falling on Cedars, German lobby card. 1999

[marnz]

okay so far my main thoughts about Snow Falling on Cedars is that I hate Ishmael Chambers so much it’s unreal

[haveyoureadthispoll]

Gripping, tragic, and densely atmospheric—a masterpiece of suspense San Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound, is a place so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies. But in 1954 a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American named Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with his murder. In the course of the ensuing trial, it becomes clear that what is at stake is more than a man's guilt. For on San Pedro, memories of a charmed love affair between a white boy and the Japanese girl who grew up to become Kabuo's wife; memories of land desired, paid for, and lost. Above all, San Piedro is haunted by the memory of what happened to its Japanese residents during World War II, when an entire community was sent into exile while its neighbors watched.