Every time readers complain, “It’s just a movie,” you can be sure that they’ve undergone pop-culture neutralization without detecting what has transpired. They don’t even remember being anesthetized. The numbing experience of Birdman, Spotlight, The Shape of Water, Parasite, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Oppenheimer as “entertainment” dulled their movie reflexes.
This is the result of not having great movie experiences. And when ordeals such as First Cow, Drive My Car, Tár, Killers of the Flower Moon, and The Brutalist are critically acclaimed, the damage and confusion are incalculable. (I was pleased to play my gerrymandering part in the New York Film Critics Circle voting that awarded David O. Russell’s 2013 American Hustle in a close race with the odious 12 Years a Slave.)
American Hustle may have been the last truly entertaining movie that the critical constabulary endorsed. Since then, a media sea change has betrayed the public’s trust in favor of coterie partisanship. Russell’s satire of the FBI’s Abscam sting operation revealed national characteristics (with a gallery of superb, idiosyncratic performances by Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, and a pre-psychotic Robert DeNiro) as well as international political intrigue. Its wry vision of American corruption predicted the deep-state nervous breakdown that would occur with the 2016 presidential election. And it’s that collapse of integrity — the moral bankruptcy of journalists becoming advocate-activists — that destroyed Hollywood creativity. Critical cultural thinking collapsed.
Perhaps Millennial moviegoers — raised on video games and television — were never taught how to recognize greatness. It might be the gaming or comic-book aesthetic (the root of adolescent self-regard) that precluded appreciation for what a work of art tells us about our souls and our society (politics). The Marvel Comics Universe, Pixar triviality, and Christopher Nolan nihilism dominated film culture. The sci-fi, comic book, action movie simply did not operate on intellectual or philosophical terms until the arrival of kinetic mythologist Zack Snyder and the visionary stylist Michael Bay.
The antidote for this dilemma is Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha, from 1994 but newly restored and released by Kino Lorber. It isn’t obviously political, nor it is apolitical. But political awareness suffuses its story of spiritual quest: Dean and Lisa Conrad and their nine-year-old son Jesse are invited by a group of monks from Tibet who are looking for the reincarnation of their great Buddhist teacher. It’s the same circumstances that Bertolucci plumbed in The Spider’s Stratagem, Partner, The Conformist, 1900, and The Last Emperor but less obvious. Bertolucci outstrips the spiritual and political quandary of Kidnapped, by his contemporary Marco Bellocchio. Little Buddha is peak Bertolucci, which is to say, peak cinema, opulent and awesome, with camera movement that follows thought so that our reception of information provides the joy of learning.
That’s the idea that Bertolucci inherited from his mentors Pier Paolo Pasolini and Jean-Luc Godard, who found the politics of cinema in its narrative structure and ideology. That’s how Italian-Marxist Bertolucci observed Buddhism, as a rationalist alternative to Italian Catholicism. Little Buddha’s screenwriters Rudy Wurlitzer (Walker) and Mark Peploe (Zabriskie Point, The Passenger) don’t proselytize but are fascinated by Buddhism as an answer to contemporary despair and Western religious orthodoxy. This explains casting pop singer Chris Isaak as Dean, evoking the Beat-era figure Dean Moriarty, and dynastic Bridget Fonda as Lisa, evoking Antonioni muse Monica Vitti — touchstones of 20th-century existentialism. Their adventure begins when Lama Norbu (Ying Ruocheng) gives little Jesse (Alex Wiesendanger) a storybook that introduces us to Buddhist teachings that once were counterculture pleasures courtesy of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha.
An early scene cross-cutting the humble monks traveling to Seattle to meet the ultra-sophisticated Conrads is scored by Iris DeMent’s folk-gospel “Let the Mystery Be.” DeMent’s agnosticism introduces the film’s mystification. Heard now, the tune resonates with the decline in Millennial Christian practice and evokes DeMent’s recent confusion of religious principles and political partisanship. Bertolucci takes us through this conflict and skepticism with sublime generosity.
As long as films like Little Buddha are available, cinema is not dead. But a thriving film culture requires viewers who, like religious zealots, are ready to appreciate it. Little Buddha was initiated by producer Jeremy Thomas’s liberal response to the Dalai Lama’s conflict with China in the 1980s. Its unabashed Western perspective is irrefutable, like Bertolucci’s emotional beauty, which contemporary cinema has lost. Using gentle, androgynous action star Keanu Reeves as Siddhartha, the Tibetan prince who renounces wealth and comfort to become the legendary Buddha, is a stroke of genius. Reeves plays more than “the awakened one”; he embodies goodness. Bertolucci approaches cinema (and Buddhism) as the great storybook. In sequences depicting Siddhartha’s enlightenment, or Norbu explaining the meaning of “impermanence,” Bertolucci makes ideas aesthetic, sumptuous, and cinematic.
Little Buddha’s splendid 65mm cinematography by Vittorio Storaro and the exultant music score by Ryuichi Sakamoto surpass their Oscar-winning cross-cultural work in The Last Emperor (although I am dismayed by the Blu-Ray transfer that makes its once sharp gold, black, and vermillion colors hazy). This film’s play with polytheism and polyrhythmic narrative structure (simplified in the metaphor of a multicolored mandala) should make it a timeless classic that exceeds political interest, teaching modern moviegoers what film art can accomplish. Little Buddha is as rich as any work of art you’ve ever seen; the best cinema is never “just a movie.”