A risk worth taking: Scorsese'a 'Kundun'.

What is it about Buddhism that elicits the child in sophisticated European and American directors? The reverence toward every living thing? The reliance on anecdote and legends to teach truths? The time-tripping of reincarnation? In any event, though Bernardo Bertolucci's Little Buddha was mostly dreadful, its forty-five-minute rendition of the story of Prince Siddharta was as limpid and joyous as the best children's picture book. Jean-Jacques Annaud's Seven Years in Tibet may or may not have been historically accurate, but it scored as a boy's adventure story that H. Rider Haggard would have approved. And now Martin Scorsese's Kundun, the life of the Dalai Lama from boyhood until his exile from Tibet, proves to be, at its best, more lyrical and more tender than any other movie by this director. (Significantly, the screenwriter and instigator of the project was Melissa Mathison, who wrote the best children's movies of the last quarter century, E.T. and The Black Stallion.)

Of course, the maker of The Age of Innocence and The Last Temptation of Christ had already proved his ability to range widely in subject matter, but always this obsessive has been drawn to other obsessives. Kundun's protagonist is different: a hero elected by fate, abashed by his responsibilities and his powers of clairvoyance, who modestly watches himself rising to the historical occasion when his country is menaced by China. And Scorsese tempers his cinematic style to the quality of his hero. This movie has a glinting beauty and a steady, perhaps too steady, tempo. It never bores yet it never makes you catch your breath. It evinces sympathy yet it's also diffident, even a little opaque. I would call it cool in the sense of the old Indian word, nibbuta, "the sense of being cool after a fever." All of Scorsese's other films run temperatures of 105, but Kundun is strictly nibbuta.

For me, most of the best scenes are in the first half-hour, when the child is discovered by Tibet's regent to be the fourteenth Dalai Lama and taken to the central monastery for education and eventual enthronement. We see through the boy's eyes, and Scorsese's virtuosic panning is strictly anchored to the wonderment the boy feels as his roving eyes fasten on one thing after another: the gleaming, candle-lit faces of the monks as they examine the child for signs of holiness; the rich material of his new shoes; a mouse drinking with impunity from goblets of water on an altar. Like the child, the camera beautifully notices.

Also good is the paradoxical relationship of little Kundun (the name given to all the Dalai Lamas) to the adults who are both in charge and in awe of him. The monks must chide him when he doesn't study, yet, a moment after scolding, they hang on his every word. Even more poignant is the boy's relationship with his parents, pious Buddhists who feel both blessed and nonplussed that their son has turned out to be the avatar of the compassionate Buddha. Even after Kundun's selection, his father slaps the imp who plucks a hair from the paternal moustache, but then feels obliged to apologize.

Kundun doesn't deteriorate after these early magical sequences, but rather it levels off. It's difficult to dramatize a nonviolent hero's resistance to tyranny. China advances, the Dalai Lama urges firmness without bloodshed. Officials bully, the Dalai Lama sits mute. Slaughter takes place, the Dalai Lama's face is filled with anguish. It's not that nonviolent resistance is in itself nondramatic, but the seesaw pattern of violent provocation and tacit response is monotonous. I felt I was watching a stormy ocean thundering against a great smooth wall. No matter how violent the waves, the wall remains smooth, smooth, smooth.

The problem becomes clear by contrast when there occurs a scene of high drama near the end of the movie. Kundun has gone to China to negotiate with Mao, and the tyrant has just about convinced the Tibetan leader that communism can coexist peacefully, even fruitfully, with Buddhism. Then there is a final interview and the mask slips. "You must understand," the chairman purrs with oleaginous certitude as he shifts his bulk on a settee a little closer to his "honored" guest, "that all religions are poison...the opiate of the people." That little sideways slide, as menacing as any death threat in a Scorsese Mafioso movie, lets Kundun and us know that compromise won't work. The glint of danger, the flash of insight, the change of destiny - these are dramatic in a way that's absent from much of the movie.

Three of the greatest technical artists alive - cinematographer Roger Deakins, designer Dante Ferretti, and editor Thelma Schoonmaker - helped Scorsese to a visual exquisiteness that never becomes pompous or pseudo-mystical. And some of the most memorable shots aren't spectacular ones of nature or war but odd, sneaky glances and telling gestures: Kundun staring down with wonder at the beautiful shoes he can now wear after a childhood of poverty; our hero, riding through Peking, innocently enjoying a Red Chinese children's chorus, only to have the performance cut short by his more savvy adviser who recognizes propagandistic drivel when he hears it and politely rolls up the window.

But Scorsese has also made some miscalculations. While Kundun's father's corpse is, according to custom, chopped up and fed to vultures, the director has Mao's imperialistic demands read on the soundtrack, which seems to present a glib, false parallel between a sacred rite (no matter how grisly to our Western eyes) and the brutal dismemberment of a country. When the Dalai Lama dreams of the slaughter of his people, Scorsese positions the ruler amid a mass of blood-drenched corpses and pulls the camera back into a distant overhead shot that turns the welter of bodies into a Jackson Pollock painting. It's an overly aesthetic effect, something the director generally avoids. And the last sequence of Kundun's escape from his enemies into India has too many slow-motion shots and gnomic utterances on the soundtrack. This turns the escape into something lyrical instead of the passage through purgatory that the climax requires.

The acting of nonprofessionals in all roles is mostly wonderful but in the lead role of the grown Kundun, Tenzin Thyjthob Tsarong demonstrates the limits of the amateur actor, even when he's physically appealing and apt. Tsarong is perfect in his scenes with the Red generals whose bureaucratic huffing amusingly contrasts with the spiritual leader's calm certitude. But when the Dalai Lama must express his anguish, Scorsese can only have Tsarong hide his face and shake his shoulders. These heavy-handed directorial tricks are meant to cover the fact that the nonprofessional can't really produce the requisite emotion.

Yet this film is quite an achievement for Scorsese, a step forward because it's a step sideways. It is as uncharacteristic of his other works as Hard Times was for Dickens, as the "Old Possum" poems were for Eliot. Only a truly major, fertile artist dares not to be himself.