Seven Years in Tibet . Newcity Chicago . 10-27-97

Seven Years in Tibet

DIRECTED BY: Jean-Jacques Annaud

REVIEWED: 10-27-97

Brad Pitt sports Ralph Fiennes' yellow hair and his own honey skin in this lustrous but lifeless adaptation of Austrian adventurer Heinrich Harrer's experiences in the Himalayas. Ducking out on Fatherland and fatherhood, cocky Nazi Olympian Harrer purposefully deserts his pregnant wife in 1939 to scale a Kashmiri peak but winds up tramping around the Himalayas (sans Lonely Planet) and befriending the young Dalai Lama years before Richard Gere. Pitt plays Harrer adequately, owing less to his tight-lipped monotone than to his gift for exuding snot-nosed arrogance. You'd like to think his stiffness is a conscious emulation of Aryan reserve, but it's more likely he's just trying not to make any quick, jerky moves in one of the first movies that doesn't compel him talk like a flamboyant hick. To be fair, no one, not even Pitt, can compete with the breathtaking scenery (much of which was shot in Argentina). Against a crisp blue sky, climbers with frost-encrusted beards dig their crampons into gleaming white walls of ice. Crimson-robed monks rustle into toasty rooms of wood and gold so vividly dressed, you can almost smell the incense. Couched like a jewel amid all of this splendor is the excitable boy Lama, played expertly by Jamyang Jamtsho Wangchuk, with that improbable blend of spunk and placidity seen in the real-life Lama's latterday persona. Too bad the story of Harrer's transformation retreats into the charming East-meets-West scenes we've come to love in which those bald-headed, child-like Buddhist monks flail and gurgle over ice skates, film projectors and other such Western toys. By the time the Chinese mount their offensive against Tibet, the story of self-realization has given way to a history lesson and not even John Williams' lovely orchestral swells can fill in the gaps.

--Ellen Fox

Full Length Reviews
Seven Years in Tibet
Seven Years in Tibet
Seven Years in Tibet
Seven Years in Tibet
Seven Years in Tibet
Seven Years in Tibet
Seven Years in Tibet

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