Amazon.co.uk Review
A new film from the director of
Shine, which was set in Australia, might be expected to showcase a very up-front, warm musical score. Instead, as the title
Snow Falling On Cedars suggests, we are a world away from the land Down Under, among the forests and mists of America's Pacific Northwest. This is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama and a love story set in the 1940s, a classically elegant film of the old school. The premise echoes
Twin Peaks, James Newton Howard's long, understated score, continuing directions explored in his
Sixth Sense. Autumnal orchestral colours blend with otherworldly choir, subtle electronics and sparse percussion, the sound-world rising and falling, ebbing and flowing, like the ocean. Solo cello and shakuhachi evoke the white-American, American-Japanese tragedy, bringing a reflective poignancy to brooding musical tapestries: Toru Takemitsu's
November Steps meets Howard Shore's
The Silence of the Lambs by way of James Horner's
Legends of the Fall . In a score which evokes the dark side of the heart, Howard mixes sombrely effective melodies and inventively crafted atmospherics with such stark and forbidding lustre that the choral yearning of "Tarawa" suddenly rises like a mountain peak reaching unstoppably for the sun. For once the cliché "hauntingly beautiful" could not be more appropriate.
--Gary S Dalkin