Little Buddha

Bernardo Bertolucci says that he's fed up with mindless Western con­sumerism, and that his new film, Little Buddha, is his pursuit of some greater, more spiritual value.

Okay. It sounds good to me. But despite the philosophy, Little Buddha plays like a meandering exercise in monotony. The brilliant flair that Bertolucci has often shown for portraying decadence just doesn't appear to spark when he's trying hard to be meditative. Instead, you get the distinct impression that Bertolucci directed this movie in his sleep.

Little Buddha is more of a Zen fairy tale than an epic quest. The idea for the film was inspired by several recent cases of young Western children who are believed to be the reincarnation of various important Tibetan lamas. Considering the brutal conditions of life in Chinese-occupied Tibet, it's not hard to see why a reincarnated lama might wish to appear in the States. The only question is, why Seattle? As presented in Little Buddha, the whole state of Washington is a perpetu­ally grey, rain-swept slab of concrete.

But Lama Dorje (Tsultim Gyelsen Geshe) must have liked the climate. Though dead, he returns to a fellow Tibetan priest in a dream and suggests that his reincarna­tion lives in a fancy modernist house in Seattle. Apparently, his soul has been reborn in the form of the all-American kid (Alex Wiesendanger) who lives there.

The boy's parents (Chris Isaak and Brid­get Fonda) are perturbed, at first, when a gaggle of Tibetan monks shows up on their doorstep. But since both Isaak and Fonda deliver embarrassingly bad performances, they have no business giving anyone else a hard time. In fact, the monks (some of whom are actually Buddhist monks) are the only people in the movie who act as if they know what they're doing.

In order to help the bad Western actors understand what's happening, the monks give them a children's book that explains how young Prince Siddhartha became the Buddha. Flashback to India 2,500 years ago (where we finally get to see some sunlight). Keanu Reeves pops up as the original poster boy of Karma in a jazzy rendition of Buddhist mythology that repeatedly veers into the Cecil B. DeMille school of thun­derous enlightenment. You half expect Charlton Heston to show up.

Through it all, a single, nagging question is continually reborn: what's the point? In the past, Bertolucci has been stylistically breathtaking (The Conformist), raw and dar­ing (Last Tango in Paris) and outrageously ambitious (1900 and The Last Emperor). With Little Buddha, he appears to be interested only in being exotic. Most of the movie comes off like a photo spread for National Geographic — lacking, however, the informative captions.