Kundun

viewed September 3, 1999 on video

For full information about this film, click here

Kundun is lush, beautiful, excessive filmmaking that manages to drive through a couple decades of history without giving any more insight to the Dalai Lama or his people than his Holiness’ interview with Larry King (granted the scenes of Tibet as depicted by Martin Scorsese are far more visually captivating than the landscape of Larry King’s forehead).  To paraphrase Pauline Kael’s critique of Raging Bull, Kundun suffers from a sense of its own importance.  The excessive use of Philip Glass’ pounding music and an impatiently-paced narrative drives us characters who are oddly shallow and merely follow type as they pass in and out of Kundun’s young life. As a result, I don't feel like I've experienced even an illusion of Tibetan history or reality.

Critics have questioned Scorsese for tackling subject matter beyond his realm of expertise (that is, New York). I am not making such a skeptical attack on Scorsese's foreign relationship with his chosen subject ­ on the contrary, I think it's wonderful that he has sought to depict one of the major figures in Asia, and one of the major religious figures in the world.  This is the kind of big-time Hollywood treatment of an Asian subject that I’ve dreamed would lead to full bloom support of such projects (and sadly, the cold critical and audience reception to this film forecast the contrary). 

That Scorsese would transport his Catholic-based religious inquiries ­ specifically, a man reckoning with his own spirituality in a secular world ­ to a different culture promises much in the way of discovery by contrast.  Unfortunately, he seems to have been overly enraptured with the idea of a holy man living among us, and gives us little more than the pretty image of a man’s unblemished faith. 

In The Last Temptation of Christ, Scorsese confronted head-on the crisis of doubt, the quality that many Christians believe is what enables true faith in God.  In Kundun, Scorsese seems to have sought a man who is more assured of his spiritual authority, and whose battles are more external ­ directed towards a world threatening to consume him ­ than internal.  This sounds promising, but the final product has less bite than Last Temptation, perhaps because, as Roger Ebert has suggested, Scorsese has little in common to identify with the Dalai Lama.  In fact, few people could relate to this superman who seems to carry the spiritual burdens of a world on his shoulders.  Contrast this conflict to that of Jesus in Last Temptation, whose yearnings to function as a normal human (symbolized by having sex and family with Mary Magdalene) make him into more of an Everyman than a saint.

This is not to say that the duties and dilemmas Scorsese extracts from this modern saint are false, or unworthy of our consideration merely because they are not our own.  To the contrary, such majestic conflicts would be terrific if I could buy into them.  Not everyone can be John Milton, and Scorsese comes very short.  He chooses to show the Dalai Lama, his teachers, his family and his people in an iconographic series that doesn’t speak to much of daily life.  Even when the Lama is sitting with his family at dinner, I feel like I’m more in Hollywood than in Tibet.

The result is a beautiful hagiography, whose beautifulness detracts from the theological struggles ­ this places Kundun somewhere between Last Temptation, where the lushness of the secular world added fuel to Jesus' temptations, and Little Buddha, which was basically a poster ad for the exotic pleasures of Buddhism. The film is also anti-communist China, which is to be expected of a Hollywood film; aside from the cheap-shot caricature of Mao played (with a less than subtle chronic cough) by Robert Lin, it is worth noting how Scorsese collaborates with setting up the conflicts between antiquated Tibet and modernized China both visually and musically.  Philip Glass’s soundtrack obviously adores Tibetan music, and its exotic quality comes into sharp contrast with the plain Communist worksongs that later infiltrate the soundtrack.  When the Lama visits Mao in Beijing, the dim blue streets and sterile hallways are naturally less entrancing than the lush reds and oranges of the Tibetan landscape.  I find it paradoxical that a work of praise for a highly ascetic religious leader should be executed with such lavishness; and these blaring sounds and opulent images may be what’s distracting us from the nature of the Lama’s life.  Tibet then, as it is even now, was severely poverty-stricken: why not show the harshness of his living conditions?  In addition to fending off the Chinese, why not also show the Lama dealing with the poverty of his people?  Through Scorsese’s eyes, his holiness’ life seems misleadingly Edenic.

Uncharacteristically, Scorsese is too soft with his subject. Never before has he treated his hero with such unquestioning adoration, and the result is a movie we are expected to admire, and we do, but we stand unamazed, about the Lama, and Asian people for that matter.  In a sense, the Dalai Lama, his oppressed people, and the sinister Communist Chinese come off as no less abstract than the hordes of stock stereotypes that Hollywood churns out for Asian characters. If Scorsese had taken less of the Gandhi approach and taken his subject off the pedestal, we could have had something to really sink our teeth into, which would be a real service for Tibetans and Asians.

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