When a movie is as physically beautiful as “Seven Years in Tibet,” it disarms criticism for a while. Director Jean-Jacques Annaud’s adaptation of Heinrich Harrer’s 1953 Tibetan memoir, full of huge mountainscapes and overpowering vistas, tends to put us in the slightly exalted mood of an enchanting boy’s adventure. As co-stars Brad Pitt and David Thewlis scale those soaring peaks (originally in the Himalayas but re-created here in the Argentine Andes) or hike through picturesque valleys, “Tibet” casts a spell.
Even though it may not last, that glow surrounds the real-life story: Austrian mountain ace Harrer’s early climbing feats, his arrest by the British army at the onset of World War II, and his escape into Tibet, where he met and befriended (for life) the young Dalai Lama. Pitt is often at his best in these tales of romanticized real-life adventure (like “A River Runs Through It”). And in Harrer, except for the accent, he seems to have found an ideal role: a man who, by his own account, underwent a spiritual transformation.
In Tibet, through his contact with the devoutly Buddhist populace and the beaming, boyishly happy Dalai Lama, Harrer changes. Rough, selfish and egotistical at the start — a young man who grew up and participated in the Nazi era and who abandoned his pregnant wife for mountaineering adventures — he becomes more tolerant, generous and open, committed to human understanding rather than conquest.
Finally, when the invading Chinese army turns Tibet into a bloody battleground after World War II’s end, Harrer comes full circle, observing war from the vantage point of victim, treasuring life and friendship rather than conquest — whether of men or mountains.
As captured by cinematographer Robert Fraisse, those towering mock Himalayas have a primal grandeur. We can forgive the sometimes erratic accents of co-stars Pitt and David Thewlis (as his enemy-turned-friend Peter Aufschnaiter) when we watch Annaud’s spectacular scenes of the two finding their way to the movie’s recreated Tibetan villages and palaces and becoming assimilated into this new culture. Pitt and Thewlis, with their qualities of raw passion and impishness, tenderness and violence, imbue their roles with immediacy and elemental force. There’s a magical quality to the scenes between Harrer and the Dalai Lama, variously played by Dorjee Tsering (at 4), Sonam Wangchuk (at 8) and Jamyang Jamtsho Wangchuk (at 14). And it’s especially strong in the scenes of the older Wangchuk, cross-legged on his throne, with his radiant self-possession and mischievous smile.
Like Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Little Buddha,” “Seven Years in Tibet” may be pop Buddhism, but at its best, it’s also fun, an exotic adventure. “Tibet” is, at the very least, a gorgeous travelogue, wondrously well shot — though we can argue it should have been more; it tries for something bigger and fails.
Just as he did in “The Bear” or “Quest for Fire,” Annaud puts a spiritual spin on this physical adventure. At the center of the gorgeous travelogue is a deeply flawed character who finds transcendence. Harrer undergoes a change similar — in more ways than the movie makes clear — to the philosophical transformation of Oskar Schindler, the Nazi industrialist turned benefactor in “Schindler’s List.” By obscuring that change — Harrer, like Schindler, was initially an opportunistic Nazi — the movie loses an opportunity to become a real drama of redemption. And Pitt loses a great acting opportunity as well.
When “Seven Years in Tibet” tries to tell more serious stories — of Harrer’s transformation, of the destruction of Tibetan villages and culture by the invading Chinese — its shortcomings really obtrude. Screenwriter Becky Johnston (“The Prince of Tides”) has made Harrer a simple hero, and Pitt, with his built-in charisma, makes him more so. We don’t sense enough struggle in Harrer, because his past isn’t touched on, except for two lines added after the revelation in the German magazine “Stern” of Harrer’s Nazi past as an S.S. sergeant during his youthful mountain climbing glory days in Germany.
In the movie’s last dreadful irony, Harrer watches the Tibetans subjugated by another country, China, which destroys the Buddhist nation’s way of life, just as Hitler’s Nazis persecuted or murdered Germany’s Jews.
How can the movie convincingly deal with Chinese terrorism against the Tibetans and the attempt to wipe out Tibetan culture, while downplaying Harrer’s history — which he disguised or ignored for years but has since forcefully condemned? (Harrer’s recent statement on the controversy: “My personal political philosophy grew out of my life in Tibet . . . and places great emphasis on human life and human dignity . . . (It) leads me to condemn as strongly as possible the horrible crimes of the Nazi period.”)
You can understand why Harrer, writing in 1953 and still close to World War II, would want to fudge his own past. But the moviemakers should have dug deeper. There’s a shallowness throughout Johnston’s script that goes beyond what she didn’t know — and it reduces the impact of what she did know as well. The Chinese and their Tibetan collaborators are presented as cliche movie cowards and devils when they might have been more dramatically interesting and as misguided, brutal idealists, erecting a hell out of good intentions. (Harrer even slaps one Tibetan turncoat around in a scene that suggests some other movie called “Shootout at Buddhist Bend.”)
The magic and missteps, grandeur and folly of “Seven Years in Tibet” are all intermeshed. In reaching for the mountains, Harrer was enacting a common German folk myth which was also a super-popular German movie genre of the ’20s and ’30s. It was in Mountain movies like “The White Hell of Pitz Palu” and “The Blue Light” that the young Leni Riefenstahl (later director of “Triumph of the Will”) first made her mark as actress and actress-director. For the German audience, and probably for the Austrian Harrer, these films represented their striving for ideals: pure, high, windswept, above the whole world. So Harrer’s transformation in the mountaintop Tibetan villages has another irony the film misses.
Should we enjoy the movie’s magic? Or lament its flaws? Both, probably. Like all mountain climbers, both Harrer and the moviemakers are always right below the sky and one step from an abyss. The movie perhaps looks up too often, avoiding what lies below.
”SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET”
(star) (star) (star)
Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud; written by Becky Johnston, based on the book by Heinrich Harrer; photographed by Robert Fraisse; edited by Noelle Boisson; production designed by At Hoang; music by John Williams, cello solos by Yo-Yo Ma; produced by Annaud, John H. Williams, Iain Smith. A Tristar release; opens Friday. Running time: 2:11. MPAA rating: PG-13.
THE CAST
Heinrich Harrer …………………….. Brad Pitt
Peter Aufschnaiter ………………….. David Thewlis
Ngawang Jigme ………………………. B. D. Wong
Kungo Tsarong ………………………. Mako
Regent …………………………….. Danny Denzongpa
Chinese “Amban” …………………… Victor Wong
Dalai Lama (at 14) ………………….. Jamyang Jamtsho Wangchuk
Great Mother ……………………….. Jetsun Pema
