ROANOKE TIMES 

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, July 16, 1994                   TAG: 9407190005
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: B-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By KATHERINE REED STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

MOVIE IS A SUPERFICIAL LOOK AT BUDDHISM

"Little Buddha" might have worked as a child's view of Buddhism - or spirituality, for that matter - but director Bernardo Bertolucci seems so preoccupied with creating a film of great beauty and pageantry that he forgot that what connects an audience to a movie is its characters. Good or bad, we ought to feel strongly about them.

It's not that the children in this movie aren't likable enough. Or their parents. Or the monks. Heck, if this were a tour - and sometimes it looks just like one - you'd come home and tell your friends: "It was very nice." But you'd have that sort of empty feeling that tourists sometimes have, the one that comes from feeling that you've been kept at bay, that the really important stuff was somewhere else, in another city.

Screenwriters Rudy Wurlitzer and Mark Peploe are partly to blame for writing this film into a corner - or into an abyss. Although they provide us with a central character - the boy, Jesse (Alex Wiesendanger) - we do not know enough about him or his life as an American boy to feel connected to what might have been an extraordinary, spiritual indoctrination.

The story begins in a monastery - bathed in golden light - in Bhutan where an ailing, spiritual teacher (Ying Ruocheng) receives news that the reincarnation of his dead teacher may be living in Seattle. Jesse is the only child of stiff, schoolteacher mom Lisa (Bridget Fonda) and brooding, engineer dad Dean (Chris Isaak). They live in a cold, blue-lit modern house, which is soon visited by the spiritual leader and a local monk.

All in all, Mom and Dad take the news pretty well that their son may be a great spiritual leader, and eventually Dean decides that Bhutan is as good a tourist destination as any.

The film jumps between this story and a storybook version of the birth of Buddha, Prince Siddhartha (Keanu Reeves). Really, you haven't lived until you've seen Keanu naked from the waist up, in heavy eyeliner, growing his hair waist-length, under a tree. For all of their Cecil B. DeMille-ness, these are some of the most engaging scenes in the movie, especially the one in which an enormous cobra slithers up and positions itself over the meditating Siddhartha's head, to protect him from the rain.

Eventually, Buddha is born and the film must return to the present in Bhutan, where a sort of contest is under way to determine which of three children (one of them female) is the true reincarnation of the monks' dead leader. But their ceremonial hats might well be Mickey ears. It all seems sort of silly in the end, a very superficial, most bogus adventure.

Little Buddha ** 1/2

A Miramax release playing at The Grandin Theatre. Rated PG for supposed adult themes. 2 hours and 2 minutes. 


 by CNB