Smilla's Sense of Snow [DVD] [1997] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

Julia Ormond's barely suppressed anger perfectly captures Smilla's inner ferocity, and she totally dominates this Bille August-directed film. Vanessa Redgrave plays a cameo role, and Richard Harris is a supporting character, but his primary role is to look menacing as he runs the mining company, which has a powerful secret. Clipper Miano, a 6-year-old Inuit, is wonderful as Isaiah, with his sad, little face and his needy reaching out. Gabriel Byrne, as an enigmatic mechanic who never goes to his shop, plays a role which fits the plot, but he himself remains a mystery throughout, despite his relationship with Smilla. The harshness of the Greenland setting, combined with the snow, the bleak grayness of wintery Copenhagen, the semi-darkness of most of the scenes, and Smilla's own remote coldness create a powerful mood and increase the suspense and unease.

The problem with the film, like the novel, is that the psychological study of Smilla, which is the most interesting and best-developed aspect of the story, gets waylaid by pyrotechnics and thriller effects. Explosions, complex medical technology, extinct life forms coming back to life in sci-fi manner, flashbacks of Isaiah's life (designed to tug at the heartstrings), and mysterious ships in the night turn what might have been a brilliant psychological study into a snowbound melodrama. The cinematography is gorgeous and effective, as is Ormond, but neither can save the film from its split personality. Mary Whipple

Smilla, half Inuit herself and brought to Copenhagen against her will after her Inuit mother's death, is a loner, a rebel against society, hiding her fears and loneliness under a thick coat of armor of unapproachability and trying to be "rough all over." Unable and unwilling to ever lift that coat of armor, she takes refuge in science - her definition of longing are mathematics's negative numbers, the "formalization of the feeling that you're missing something." - Yet, this movie's Smilla is not the Smilla Jaspersen of Peter Hoeg's novel which the movie seeks to adapt ... although Julia Ormond's performance is not exactly coated with sugar, she is a far cry from the book's 37-year old woman who hates her Danish father for tearing her from her Greenlandic roots and open skies, and who hates the confines of the society in which he has made her grow up.

And as the story's protagonist changes in the movie adaption, so does the story line itself - unfortunately, not for the better. Even accepting that it would have been impossible to translate all the novel's subplots and subtleties onto the screen, what begins like a complex, introspective story about loneliness, the loss of home, and the unchecked power and ambition of a group of prestigious scientists, turns into your average thriller in the end - a huge let-down in an otherwise compelling movie.

Nevertheless, Ormond's performance as Bille August's Smilla (even if not Peter Hoeg's) is strong; and so, in all its quietness, is Gabriel Byrne's performance as Smilla's neighbor, the would-be mechanic. Atmospherically, the movie wonderfully projects Smilla's loneliness in the sad, gray skies and wet snow of wintry Copenhagen, as opposed to the crisp blue skies, white ice fields and limitless horizons of Greenland. For these reasons alone, the movie is well worth watching; even if those of us who have read the novel will have to leave aside a good portion of its contents to be able to appreciate the movie on its own merits.