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R: ARCHIVE, S: REVIEWS, D: 03/13/1997,

Smilla's Sense of Snow

From the title of his bestseller you can tell Danish novelist Peter Hoeg may have taken on too much -- a Greenland-Danish virago heroine obsessed by frozen water, a mysterious polar expedition involving meteorites and worms, a murdered child, and a childlike possible murderer. With his rarefied prose Hoeg almost crystallizes these loose ends into a satisfying work of art. Not so his screen adapter, Bille August, who except for a nice apocalyptic opening reduces the novel to a load of slush.

Julia Ormond continues her on-screen misadventures in the title role of an oddball tough cookie who turns sleuth when a doleful neighbor child falls off a roof. Gabriel Byrne, Richard Broadbent, Richard Harris, and Lynn Redgrave serve as a series of talking heads that tell a spurious tale of conspiracy which leads Smilla back to Greenland on a cargo ship. All is portentous and pointless -- one wishes August had at least a sense of narrative. At the Nickelodeon, the Harvard Square, and the Chestnut Hill and in the suburbs.

-- Peter Keough