THE ARTS/CINEMA
BY RICHARD SCHICKEL
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Smilla's Sense of Snow is more than a climatological instinct. It is the projection of a wintry soul over which a long, cold arctic night settled long ago. When we meet her in director Bille August's intricate and compelling realization of Peter Hoeg's best-selling novel, Smilla Jaspersen has given her professional life over to the frozen music of mathematics, her private life over to bone-chilling isolation. The set of Smilla's face, the carriage of her body, as Julia Ormond plays her, says, "Don't ask, don't touch." She relents--angry at the show of weakness--for just one person. That is a lonely little boy named Isaiah, who lives in her apartment building.
Her identification with the child is more than that of one solitary with another. He was born in Greenland, as she was. Both of his parents are Inuits, natives of the region, as her mother was. Both have lost parents at an early age. And now, like Smilla before him, the boy finds himself trying to make a new life in Copenhagen, which to them is hardly the Danny Kaye song's "friendly old girl of a town." August makes us see it as dark and claustrophobic, stressing its contrast to the bright and limitless horizons of the land, essentially untouched by modern civilization, where they were born.
One day Smilla comes home from work and finds Isaiah dead, the victim of a fall from their building's rooftop. An accident, the police insist. A murder, her intuition tells her. This suspicion is confirmed by the increasingly hostile behavior of the authorities as she begins to investigate the case. It will come as no surprise to devotees of the paranoid thriller--is there any other kind nowadays?--that the victim is accidentally privy to information that threatens the secret plans of a powerful mining corporation to exploit and sully Greenland's purity. It will come as no surprise to them either that as the conspiracy surrounding Smilla begins to take form, the movie loses some of its superbly shadowed sense of menace.
What will surprise everyone is the dry iciness, the burning coldness of Ormond's Smilla. Up to now she has trafficked largely in vulnerability--melting in Legends of the Fall, perhaps a shade too winsome in Sabrina. Here, she is all contained fury, except for the flashes of anger and contempt that burst without warning from the darkness within. It's not exactly diva acting such as we used to get from the great ladies of the movies' classic era. She achieves her effects with less obvious calculation. But like a Barbara Stanwyck or a Bette Davis, she takes us into that country where strength shades into neurosis, and we fear that she can never be reclaimed for the more orderly pleasures of ordinary life.
It is Gabriel Byrne's duty as an enigmatically watchful neighbor-lover-ally patiently to offer her that option, and he does it with his customary brooding grace. It's the duty of a lot of good character actors to keep driving her in the opposite direction, toward the end of her very taut tether. It is the very great pleasure of this movie (well written by Ann Biderman) that its truly haunting suspense derives not from Smilla's conflict with her external enemies but from her own demons.
Thursday, November7, 1996
By Eleodoro Ventocilla
"Smilla's Sense of Snow" is a Fox Searchlight picture directed by Billie August with a cast of Julia Ormond, Gabriel Byrne, Richard Harris, Robert Loggia and Vanessa Redgrave. This film is rated R.
Danish director Billie August has a great film set for release in the United States. "Smilla's Sense of Snow" isn't it. The great film is August's sweeping Swedish-language production of "Jerusalem," which arrives in Los Angeles this month. "Smilla" is a conventional mystery-thriller which, despite an interesting artsy treatment courtesy of August's unconventional talent, ends up treading disappointingly familiar territory. Not that "Smilla" is a trainwreck on the order of August's last English-language opus, 1994's all-star, all-tepid adaptation of "The House of Spirits." Taken from Danish author Peter Hoeg's international best-seller, "Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow," the latest from the director of "Pelle the Conqueror" boasts some fresh characters involved in an unusual-for the genre, at least-web of relationships, as well as a photogenic set of Danish and Greenlandic locations. For a while, these are enough to engage imaginations bored to distraction by the latest stylized encounter of the latest L.A./New York? soundstage street.
Julia Ormond, the last big thing, stars as the title character-half Greenlandic Innuit, half American, all black-clad Eurobabe. Smilla's roots give her this sixth sense about ice and snow, you see. When she returns to her Copenhagen apartment building one day to find that a neighbor kid has fallen off the snow-covered roof, her special sense tells us there's something fishy going on. The kid's footprints are all wrong, for one thing-"No child in the world would play like that," Smilla explains. She begins investigating, plunging into a mystery that may or may not have something to do with an international mining company and a strange illness affecting its former employees.
Doing a 180-degree spin on the romantic sweetie types she played in "Sabrina,""First Knight" and (ugghh !) "Legends of the Fall," Ormond sticks a sour look on Smilla's puss and keeps it there for the duration of the picture. Our little snow expert is sort of …well, frigid, and even the friendly, mysterious stranger played by the reliable Gabriel Byrne has trouble thawing her out. Due more to goofy plot contrivances than any fault of the actors, their taming-the-ice-queen relationship doesn't end up nearly as interesting as it's supposed to be. Meanwhile, the tender, human-scaled encounters of the film's first half give way to some broadly presented conspiracy business, with a mad scientist played by Richard Harris and other bad guys running around in neat parkas from The North Face.
Lots of folks in the film have extraordinary senses. Besides Smilla's singular appreciation of frozen moisture, there's a woman with "a sense of God" (Vanessa Redgrave, thank goodness) and a blind audio specialist with an uncanny sense of sound. Smilla's American dad (Robert Loggia) has a convenient sense of what causes exotic health problems. Former cinematographer August has an amazing sense of composition, and an excellent sense of character. What he doesn't have is much sense of suspense-at least not the gut-level variety that even arthouse mystery-thrillers require in modest amounts. August seems to think the movie is about gorgeous screen-paintings of a freighter at sea or the unearthly rugged coast of Greenland. He should go to make a film about those things-a beautiful, rich film-and leave the "Usual Suspects," "Seven" style genre hackery to the uncultured American lightweights who do it well.
March 7, 1997
Review by Lisa Schwarzbaum
Who is Smilla? How did she become such a fount of glaciological wisdom? And why is she such an unrelievedly gloomy Gus? Don't count on any answers from Bille August's frozen interpretation of SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW (Fox Searchlight, R), which drips along about as slowly as a polar ice cap and leaves both those who know the international thriller on which this creepy-doings-off-the-coast-of-Greenland yarn is based and those who don't out in the cold.
In Danish author Peter Hoeg's 1993 best-seller, his arresting evocation of Smilla Jaspersen's thorny personality is the best thing going; the next best thing is her edgy relationship with her equally hooded neighbor, known only as "the mechanic," who becomes her lover and gets involved in her obsessive investigation of the suspicious death of a young Inuit boy who falls off the roof of the apartment building they all share in Copenhagen. On the page, his heroine's interesting psychic wounds and refreshing resourcefulness lift Hoeg's convoluted story to a level of psychological intrigue; without a sense of Smilla (a scientist whose main beef appears to be that she was uprooted from an idyllic childhood in Greenland when her Inuit mother died), the story is an uninflected James Bondish thing involving a meteorite, a lethal prehistoric worm, and evil doings by a giant mining company that's taken its dirty work far out to sea.
But on the screen, with a somnambulant Julia Ormond moping in the lead and a morose Gabriel Byrne as the mechanic working from an elliptical script by Ann Biderman (Primal Fear), there's nothing but Bondishness; nearly all sense of personality has been stripped, leaving only striking panoramas of ice, and plenty of it, to suggest desolation, longing, fear, despair--all the human bits that make obsessions interesting. And thus deprived of a sense of soul and leached of literary interest (the fate, too, of The House of the Spirits, August's previous brush with popular middle-brow lit), Smilla spins out of control. A procession of unknowable secondary characters (Vanessa Redgrave as a repentant former mining employee, Richard Harris as a suspicious tycoon, etc.) propel Smilla and sidekick through a jumble of random dangers, culminating in a showdown on a sea of ice floes. There, the dominant image is the unforgiving water--and the large North Face brand logo on the enemy's jacket. Hoeg never wrote of outerwear. But with no inner life at its core, an advertisement for goose-down jackets is as reasonable a parting shot as anything else in this stranded production.