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Arizona Daily Wildcat March 27, 1997
Chills without Thrills
When Peter Ho/eg's thriller "Smilla's Sense of Snow" broke through as an international bestseller in 1992 and was named Book of the Year by Time magazine, it was quick to attract film offers. The story, which takes place in Denmark and the Danish island of Greenland, must have appeared both exotic and sophisticated to directors and producers alike. However, instead of catering to one of the nearly 30 film offers that came pouring in from Hollywood and elsewhere, Ho/eg offered the rights to Academy Award- winning director (and fellow Dane) Bille August ("Pelle the Conqueror," "House of the Spirits"). Ignoring the fact that his book would essentially translate into an action-thriller on screen, Ho/eg selected August for his ability to create honest and life like scenes. The result is almost catastrophic. Not only does the film fail to thrill, but the English-speaking cast comes off as anything but lifelike. Denmark, Bille August's only real common ground with Peter Ho/eg, is seen but not spoken of in this fi lm of awkward accents, dialogue and acting.The story, which is too complex for a movie, concerns Smilla Jaspersen (Julia Ormond), a foxy half-American, half-Greenlandic Inuit who lives in Copenhagen and dreams of snow. As the film opens, Smilla's neighbor and companion, a six-year-old Greenland ic boy, has just fallen to his death from the roof of their large apartment building. Scenes of Smilla finding clues that indicate that the boy may have been murdered follow, interspersed with montage-flashbacks of the boy and she becoming friends. When r epresentatives from "Greenland Mining" (the boy's father's employer) turn up, Smilla eyes them suspiciously. A doctor informs her about an anomaly in the partial autopsy he performed on the boy, and a mysterious neighbor called the Mechanic (Gabriel Byrne ) begins involving himself in the case. Smilla harbors such an illogical hate for this character that we know she is destined to fall for him.
The search for the truth about the boy's death leads all the way back to Greenland, and we are asked to view this as a journey of personal reconciliation for Smilla. "Every day I'm on this earth," she says, "I'm in exile." But it is impossible to sense t his. Her accent doesn't suggest anything but angst, and she is as white as the snow that is supposed to mean so much to her native heart. Besides being melodramatic, her speech has an awkward crudeness to it that doesn't jive with her character. I saw the film with a friend who's lived in Denmark for a year, and we both felt that this may be due to a poor translation.
This is perhaps the essence of the film: a poor translation of an interesting book. Not even the snow shots are satisfying. Although magnificent in parts, they are tainted by cheap special effects. August is on thin ice integrating computer generated ava lanches into his film. "Smilla's Sense of Snow" is quite definitely a movie on the rocks.
