A little too long

Rating: 6/10 (2 February 2000)

There's an attempt here to capture the symbolism of the child as the spiritual leader of humankind. After all, the child is older than the adult by a generation and therefore, evolutionarily speaking, the adult's elder. The idea that a child might be wiser than the adult is plausible since the child is not yet corrupted by the prejudices and delusions of the current society, and may see things more clearly than we can. If I had made this film, I would have worked on those ideas. Still I doubt success since what is really necessary is an illumination of Tibetan Buddhism, which is beyond the reach of a general audience.
What Jean-Jacques Annaud does is keep the camera on his star, Brad Pitt, and hope Pitt's charisma will carry the film. It does not, although Pitt does a commendable job, his accent fading in and out notwithstanding. It's just that without any real tension in the story, the film is just a picturesque travelogue, and not a very good one at that. There is no attempt to come to grips with Tibetan society nor with the issues surrounding the Communist aggression. Annaud does work hard on the relationship between Harra and the Dalai Lama, achieving unfortunately a sort of Western mid-brow comprehension. I was going to say news magazine comprehension, but it doesn't even reach that. Harra shows the kid how to work gadgets and trades some superficial knowledge of the world while learning humility and social responsibility. The unavoidable irony that Harra plays the father to the Dalai Lama instead of his own son was agreeable although acted out with entirely too much familiarity. Worse fault though is to just present the child as the Dalai Lama without attempting to show why a child is chosen in the first place. Just to illustrate how far from the reality of Tibetan Buddhism this film was, let me ask the question, why not a girl?
(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)