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'Smilla's Sense': Snow Blind

Danish director Bille August seemed to plug directly into the human experience with "The Best Intentions" and "Pelle the Conqueror." But he was short-circuited in 1994 by his first English-language picture, "The House of the Spirits," a botched, even laughable adaptation of the Isabel Allende novel. Unfortunately, as "Smilla’s Sense of Snow" demonstrates, August’s power has yet to be restored.

This adaptation of Peter Hoeg’s best-selling novel certainly lures us into intriguing circumstances: the unexplained death of a 6-year-old Inuit boy in Copenhagen, and an Inuit-American woman’s attempt to get to the bottom of it.

The woman (Julia Ormond), a scientist called Smilla, feels connected to the boy on many levels. Smilla, too, is a Greenlandic immigrant in the Danish capital. When her mother died tragically in Greenland, Smilla’s American father (Robert Loggia) moved the girl (also 6 at the time) to Copenhagen. She has been living in painful exile ever since.

As a result, she’s reclusive, and often hostile to people. She’s also drawn to abstract mysteries, such as the limitless world of mathematics and the almost infinitesimal manifestations of snow and ice. When the boy (Clipper Miano), Smilla’s only friend, is found crumpled in the snow, she becomes obsessed with solving the mystery.

Although he had a fear of heights, he appears to have leapt from the roof by himself. When the chief examiner (Tom Wilkinson), head of the Institute for Arctic Medicine, examines the child’s body and declares the case closed, she realizes something is amiss. With the help of an unnamed, rather enigmatic mechanic (Gabriel Byrne) who lives in her building, Smilla pursues things to the bitter end.

August and screenwriter Ann Biderman seem to have a collective blind spot for unintentional comedy. Copenhagen, it seems, is such a teeny-tiny city, characters bump coincidentally into each other several times a day. Byrne shows up in so many unlikely places, it becomes a running joke to guess where that face will appear next.

Worst of all, August seems to have no idea how to make a thriller, well, thrilling. The shadowy figures, who stand in Smilla’s way, would have to work nights to be intimidating. At one point, when the mechanic and Smilla are pursued through downtown Copenhagen by a single car, free of dangerous stunts, gunfire or even one upset fruit cart, the suspense is laughably absent. Don’t mess with the bad guys in Copenhagen, this movie seems to say, they’ll stay in your rearview mirror forever. And when Smilla’s mission takes her on to a ship bound for Greenland’s ice-covered waters, the movie practically grinds to a halt.

As Smilla, Ormond is appropriately sullen and haunted. She’s as frosty as the snow that obsesses her, as she stands up to cagey forensic examiners, hostile police inspectors and other Arctic opponents. But when she’s thawed by the mechanic’s romantic attentions, her transition feels abrupt and inorganic. Perhaps, like this inert movie, she should have just stayed under the ice.

SMILLA’S SENSE OF SNOW (R) — Contains sexual situations, profanity, nudity and some violence.