Published by: World Tibet Network News Saturday, January 17, 1998

January 16, 1998

By Stephen Whitty

STAR LEDGER STAFF

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Great art can sometimes work wonderfully on small canvases. Jane Austen painted exquisite miniatures of genteel English life. Woody Allen has stayed profitably uptown for years.

But sometimes it seems the greatest art comes from risks on a grander and more reckless scale.

Martin Scorsese's "Kundun" emerges today as the year's most epic gamble. Not because of its size (this is not a sweeping, David Lean-ish travelogue). Not because of its cost (the whole movie was made for about 30 minutes worth of "Titanic"). But because of its tricky subject matter of non-violence, and because of the director attempting to bring that subject to the screen.

Yet, ironically, in these adventurous steps into new topics and foreign territory, Scorsese remains on familiar and even friendly ground. Ignore the rat-a-tat profanities and constant gore of "Mean Streets," the bruised-knuckle brawling of "Raging Bull." Scorsese's movies have always been about guilt and redemption, sacrifice and pain.

Scorsese has always been a Catholic artist, but this very Buddhist story -- "Kundun" is the biography of the current Dalai Lama, from rural toddlerhood until the 1959 invasion of Tibet -- has Christian elements, too. There is something of the Nativity story in the details of how raveling wise men came to hail a small child as a living god. There is a great deal of the anguish of Gethsemane, as the non-violent Dalai Lama huddles with his advisers, while a noose of soldiers draws ever tighter around them.

There's also a certain amount of Hollywood myth invoked, as in any Scorsese film. Certain compositions in the film's first set, a rural hut, vaguely recall scenes in the weather-beaten cabin of John Ford's "The Searchers." Close-ups of a careworn mother, hesitantly sending her son away to a better but different life, evoke similar set-ups in Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane."

But those invocations are there, not as film school pranks, but because the movies are as much a part of Scorsese's childhood as the Latin Mass, and their symbols as firmly integrated into his adult work. In some ways, "Kundun" stands as a new turn in that work. Scorsese's palette of colors is subtler than it's ever been. His storytelling is less linear, with fantasy and flashbacks mixing like two rivers meeting at the sea.

Sometimes that effect is dreamy, almost delirious. Sometimes it's merely confusing, particularly as the film buries itself deeper and deeper in Tibetan culture. It would be helpful to most movie fans, for example, to have some of these unfamiliar traditions explained. (If you don't know about Tibet's reliance on oracles, the famous seer only looks like a lunatic.) It would also be helpful to see what life was really like for people in Tibet, once you stepped outside the tiny, all-male theocracy. (Although the Chinese invaders are obviously the villains here, it's hard to argue with their insistence that Tibet is a backward feudal state.)

Despite its failings as explanatory journalism, however, "Kundun" works marvelously as an epic. And it is still, stubbornly, a Scorsese epic -- told mostly indoors, in close-ups. (The one exception -- a breathtaking crane shot rising above a field of slaughter -- is well worth the break in style).

It is an undeniably transporting film. And it is helped immeasurably by a completely unfamiliar, but largely professional cast, including Tenzin Thuthob Tsarong as the young Dalai Lama, and dozens of exiled Tibetans playing his advisers and friends. (Unlike "The Last Emperor," "Kundun" offers us no wry blond guide to the East's eternal mysteries.)

Will audiences respond to this difficult film? That's hard to know. The movie's pace is stately, and its actors are far from stars. Its Buddhist hero's devotion to harmony keeps the plot remarkably devoid of the crises and climaxes Hollywood movies are made of, and many movie fans expect. It is a huge risk -- both for Scorsese and, it must be said, for the Disney subsidiary that has released it.

But it is not a gamble that is out of character for its director, nor even very far afield from the rest of his work. "You cannot liberate me, General Tan," the Dalai Lama rebukes softly at one point. "I can only liberate myself." It is a perfect and concise example of Buddhist belief. Yet it is also a spiritual declaration that runs throughout the work of Martin Scorsese -- and it comes as easily from the lips of this Tibetan mystic as it might from the smart mouths of any of the goodfellas who prowl his city's mean streets.

RATING NOTE: The film contains several bloody scenes of military carnage.