A further waste of Martin Scorsese's time and ours. This stuffy "prestige picture" on the life of the fourteenth Dalai Lama up through his flight from Tibet with the Red Chinese nipping at his heels (and through four different actors in the central role: an unnatural acceleration of the reincarnation cycle) drops the chew-your-ear-off narration on which Scorsese has recently relied. But it substitutes a sort of expository, instructional, reportorial dialogue that suggests the real movie is taking place somewhere off screen: "Your Holiness, the Chinese have invaded" or "Holiness, the Chinese have moved their camp. The oracle's route is safe for us now." The action, if that word does not mislead, is set in an ivory-tower arena from which we can gain no sense of the people of the country or their daily life outside the walls of the monastery. (It almost makes you willing to sit still and listen to the Communists' side of things.) And although there is an abundance of native dance, courtly pageantry, grand entrances, desert caravans, sand paintings of cake-frosting color and thickness, and so forth, there is a maddening absence of anything that might be called narrative incidents or events, anything that might be recalled afterwards as such. Scorsese's main mission here as a filmmaker would appear to be to find out whether or not his customarily restless, aggressive, muscle-flexing camerawork can all by itself manufacture an event, a happening, a scene, a John Ford cavalry adventure, an Anthony Mann sword-and-sandal epic, what-have-you. The answer is unequivocally and painfully not. And the audience's most logical option, just so the time does not go completely to waste, just so there is a feeling of something getting done, would be to match the camera's calisthenics with some isometric exercises of their own in their seats. It makes a kind of sense, in a movie already courting monotony, to have enlisted Philip Glass to underscore the mood with characteristic salvos of his recording-studio throb and wobble -- the sound of someone fiddling with the volume knob. The kind of sense it makes, to be more exact, is that of pouring salt on a wound. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.