Directed by Charles Martin Smith. Starring Barry Pepper and Annabella Piugattuk. Rated PG.

Barry Pepper, who played memorable military men in We Were Soldiers and Saving Private Ryan, is here a war veteran plagued by bad memories but little self-doubt. His Charlie Halliday is a cigar-chomping, Hawaiian-shirted bush pilot hot-dogging it across the Canadian northland without really taking time to notice the land or the people passing beneath his wings. So he isn't that well prepared when he crash-lands his little floatplane in an inlet on the edge of the Arctic Circle.

Charlie isn't alone in this misadventure, and for a while he sees that as a handicap. His companion is a young Inuit woman called Kanaalaq (newcomer Annabella Piugattuk) whom he was reluctantly flying to a hospital in Yellowknife when the plane punked out. These days, it wouldn't take a very smart white person to figure out that he'd be better off in Inuit company, but the film is set in the 1950s and Charlie is the kind of guy who has been given every reason to think his way is the only way.

With summer (and its attendant black-fly swarms) ending and frost coming on quickly, he has plenty of opportunity to gain respect for Kanaalaq's survival skills. And to appreciate her humanity--an especially fragile thing, because her tuberculosis isn't exactly helped by the enforced isolation.

The film, beautifully shot by Atom Egoyan veteran Paul Sarossy and two others, is mostly as simple as that, and sometimes simplicity really is best. All the movie's themes, as adapted by director Charles Martin Smith from Farley Mowat's story "Walk Well My Brother", are summed up in the life-and-death struggle of two people alone, but not alone, on the ice. So it's somewhat annoying whenever The Snow Walker hightails it back to Yellowknife to check in with characters we don't really give a damn about to begin with.

A few early scenes showing Charlie's dalliance with a local saloon hostess (Kiersten Warren)--one of many "girls stashed all over the place", we're told--are valuable insofar as they display our hero's callowness. But cutting away from the main action so we can see her check in with his decent, long-suffering boss (Babe's James Cromwell, dignified as always) offers little insight and much pro forma dialogue. And a subplot involving Jon Gries as a rival bush pilot who can't be bothered to pursue Charlie's rescue is a feeble and forgettable attempt to add a villain to the story.

A further handicap is the utterly conventional orchestral score from Mychael Danna, who normally does much more creative work, for Egoyan and others. (Something riffing on, oh, I don't know, Inuit music might have been nice.) It's as if Smith, who played Mowat in 1983's Never Cry Wolf, didn't quite trust the audience to accept such an austere story. That's too bad, because the movie's core--so hard to capture and so brilliantly enacted by both leads--is extremely valuable. The mundane wrapping paper, though, should have been removed before the package arrived.