Annaud clearly has a profound respect for the peaceable kingdom mythologized as Shangri-La and its sad contemporary history. (Communist China, with gratuitous brutality, took over the neutral nation in 1949. The Dalai Lama, now in his sixties, has been in exile in India since 1959; 10 years ago he was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for his ongoing efforts to negotiate Tibet's spiritual and, at least, regional political autonomy.) What Annaud comes up with is part geopolitical cautionary tale, part grand adventure, part spiritual quest, and -- in the casting of Brad Pitt as Heinrich Harrer, on whose actual memoir the film is based -- part Hollywood star turn. The parts don't quite add up to the intended whole; the film doesn't give us enough of a single one of the facets of its subject. Frustratingly, it's good enough to leave us wanting more.

Recent press accounts have revealed that Harrer, an Austrian adventurer now in his eighties, was more involved with the Nazis than he had admitted in his memoir. The film handles this problem with its protagonist by trying to cut it off at the pass. In the early part of the film, Harrer is seen as a cold, selfish, extremely arrogant young man. As he sets out in 1939 on a mountaineering expedition to Tibet, his self-absorption as a minor national celebrity extends to an autocratic impatience with his pregnant wife, whom he leaves crying at the station, and a complete disdain for teamsmanship once he is on the climb in the Himalayas. We see Harrer not as incarnate evil, not the engine of Nazism -- he's too self-centered, too much a loner to belong to anything larger than himself -- but more as a Nietzschean superman, icy, strong, untouchable, above the fray of love or politics (the former with its cloying demands, the latter its compromises); he's a golden boy of amorality.

Harrer and his fellow German and Austrian expedition mates, caught unaware by the declaration of war in the late summer of 1939, are taken by the British to a prisoner-of-war camp in northern India. After three years, Harrer escapes and meets up with another of his colleagues, Peter Aufschnaiter (David Thewlis), and decides -- since he has learned by letter that his wife has left him, remarried, and plans on telling their infant son that his father died in the Himlayas -- to wander. After a year or two of braving the harsh Tibetan seasons, they manage to enter the Forbidden City of Lhasa.

Pitt's accent is credible, and he handles these early passages of the story well enough. He has no trouble at all suggesting Harrer's chilly egocentricity and, when he gets the news from home, we see a solitary man begin to cut himself off even more, who feels he must go to the nadir of experience in order to atone for his past mistakes, "to purify myself." We believe this man without a country would wander in the wilderness like a pilgrim and decide to sojourn for awhile in the Forbidden City of the world's most loftiest, most remote, country. When Harrer has finally bottomed out with his bitterness, he begins to rebuild his soul, reach out to other people, and is, in fact, "reborn." Although he doesn't have the technical skills or depth of intuition to make this transformation a memorable experience for the audience, Pitt acquits himself honorably and seems to take a few steps forward as an actor.