SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET (Tri-Star) Starring: Brad Pitt, David Thewlis, B. D. Wong, Jamyang Wangchuk. Screenplay: Becky Johnston, based on the memoir by Heinrich Harrer. Producers: Jean-Jacques Annaud, John H. Williams and Iain Smith. Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (adult themes, violence, profanity) Running Time: 137 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
If you accept Hollywood's version of things, history -- particularly the uglier parts of history -- is what happens while white people are watching. It's not terribly surprising, since studios generally balk at anything remotely depressing; fears can be allayed if an established Anglo actor anchors such projects. So we end up with revolution in South America through the eyes of James Woods in SALVADOR, the plight of Native Americans as seen by Kevin Costner in DANCES WITH WOLVES, upheaval in Burma as it affects Patricia Arquette in BEYOND RANGOON...not one of them a terrible film, but each one compromised by the sense that we couldn't be trusted to identify with a dark face. In fact, these stories aren't even about the culture involved. They're "the story of one man's/woman's awakening set against the backdrop of..."
...in this case, Tibet. SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET is the story of Heinrich Harrer (Brad Pitt), an arrogant Austrian mountaineer who leaves his preganat wife at home on the eve of World War II to scale the Himalayan peak of Nanga Parbat. Unfortunately, the expedition meets an abrupt end when the climbers are taken as prisoners of war by the British when war is officially declared. Eventually Heinrich escapes along with fellow Austrian Peter Aufschneiter (David Thewlis), and the two men try to make their way from India through Tibet to Axis-friendly China. In Tibet they find an isolated, alien culture which only gradually comes to accept them. Particularly accepting is the 14-year-old Dalai Lama himself (Jamyang Wangchuk), who becomes fascinated with Heinrich's knowledge of the outside world and makes him a trusted advisor. Heinrich, in turn, becomes devoted to the young spiritual leader, joining the Tibetan people in facing the threat which comes after the Communist victory in China.
There is a lot to like about individual moments, technical skill and overall atmosphere in SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET. An early mountain-climbing sequence is tense and restrained, the location photography is spectacular, and the performances of Thewlis and Wangchuk (enchanting as the wise yet playful Dalai Lama) are solid and appealing. The relationship between Heinrich and the Dalai Lama is the most effective element in the film, smartly rendered by Becky Johnston's script. It takes a while for SEVEN YEARS to reach that relationship, but it's well-developed once it becomes the film's focus.
It's often hard to see that focus, however, because SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET is an epic which feels like it's rushing frantically from place to place. There's a lot of ground to cover in Harrer's story, probably more than 135 minutes can cover, but that's all we get. The Nanga Parbat expedition abruptly crashes into the POW camp sequences, which crash into a montage of wandering through the mountains, which collides with a capture by bandits, which trickles into the first arrival in Lhasa. Months pass in the space between voice-overs, leaving gaps in the development of the story's force. Rather than finding the solid narrative through-line and sticking with it, the script hunts and pecks for dramatic events over a decade of time.
Of course, SEVEN YEARS' narrative through-line is the emotional and spiritual growth of Harrer, so it's hard to say whether that would have been an improvement. It's not that Pitt does a bad job as Harrer, though his Austrian accent wanders from here to there. In fact, he does a fine job of making Harrer more than just a cocky rascal; he's thoroughly self-absorbed to the point of needing a good spanking. But Pitt could give the performance of a lifetime, and we'd still be left with a film which doesn't seem to have its priorities straight. It's true that even a sweeping story needs a protagonist to give broad-scale suffering a human face, but that face doesn't have to be topped by a head of blond hair. If SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET had not attempted to be more than the biography of an interesting man, I might have enjoyed it much more. Instead, its attempts to be a "message" film end up delivering the wrong messages. While the Chinese conquest of Tibet warrants about five minutes of screen time in SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET, Harrer's project building a movie theater for the Dalai Lama gets twice that. It's ironic, in a way: even within the film, the media of the West threaten to overwhelm another culture.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 hello Dalais: 6.
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