Picture Brides were Japanese women who went off to Hawaii to wed field-workers - with only letters and pictures to identify them. In this story we follow a young woman who goes to Japan to find her husband. Alas, her husband had sent a 20 year old picture of himself. She is annoyed at this turn of events and immediately decides to return. She starts saving up her money working in the fields and doing laundry to earn the passage back. She lives with her husband, yet rebuffs his physical advances.
The movie seemed to be setting us up for the point where she finally comes to peace with her husband - and the movie does not disappoint. However, this happens only indirectly via an epilogue from one of her grandchildren.
Along the way, we see the struggles of fieldwork as well as cliched interaction with the "bosses". Some of the events seem to be added merely for dramatic effect (a child dies in the cane-field fire because the field boss refused to let them move the children closer - the mother then commits suicide.) Other events inject humor (the field workers don't understand the English (Irish?) higher boss, and need to have his words "translated" in to broken English by the Portuguese field boss.
The dialog is an "appropriate" mixture of Japanese and English (with English subtitles as needed.) The movie was intriguing and fairly well made, but it didn't quite pull off its story in a convincing way.
