Seven Years in Tibet (1997)

Jean-Jacques Annaud's 1997 adaptation of Heinrich Harrer's memoir arrives with the full apparatus of prestige: sweeping Himalayan vistas, a John Williams score, Yo-Yo Ma on cello, and Brad Pitt in the role of a man who learns humility at altitude. The film concerns an Austrian mountaineer who escapes a British prisoner-of-war camp, walks into Tibet, and becomes tutor to a teenage Dalai Lama. It is a handsome production and a slow one, more interested in the journey than the arrival, which is the sort of complaint critics have been lodging against travel epics since the form was invented.

The production made a genuine effort with its Tibetan roles, casting Jamyang Jamtsho Wangchuk, Lhakpa Tsamchoe, Danny Denzongpa, and others in parts a lazier studio might have filled with makeup and affectation. Credit where it is due. The structure, however, remains the familiar one: a Westerner arrives, absorbs a foreign culture, and serves as the lens through which we are permitted to see it. The women in the film exist to marry the supporting Austrian or to send divorce papers from Vienna. Nobody involved appears to have considered that a problem, and in 1997 nobody much did.

Where the film grows more interesting is in its handling of the record. The screenplay turns the real Harrer, an SS sergeant, into a man who sniffs at Nazi salutes, invents a Chinese negotiating visit complete with a sand mandala desecration and a remark about religion being poison, and shuffles the Dalai Lama's enthronement into a sequence the calendar does not support. The politics arrive gently, wrapped in scenery and friendship, but they arrive. The result is a well-mounted film that asks us to admire Tibet and distrust Beijing, and does so with enough craft to make the asking pleasant.