Seven Years in Tibet (1997)

Film: Seven Years in Tibet (1997)
Stars: Brad Pitt, David Thewlis, BD Wong, Mako
Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud
Oscar History: No nominations, despite it having a pretty solid pedigree (beautiful sets, gorgeous cinematography, and a score by John Williams); one of only three films where Williams won a Golden Globe nomination for his music but not an Oscar nod (the others being Earthquake and The Post)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

If you'd have asked me as a very young teenager what films seemed to be the height of luxury, I probably would have brought up Titanic, Meet Joe Black, and Seven Years in Tibet, despite having never seen the latter film.  For some reason (hormones) I had become entranced with Seven Years in Tibet, the exoticism of climbing into a far-away land, but mostly was just focused (because of hormones, pay attention) on a 34-year-old Brad Pitt with dyed-blond bangs and impossibly blue eyes.  Like, if you were to describe my type as a 13-year-old it would either be blond Brad Pitt or blond Leo DiCaprio (it is not a mistake that the first boyfriend I ever had was, in fact, a blond with blue eyes).  Because of the film's rating I wasn't allowed to see the picture initially, and for some reason, despite a morbid curiosity over what was in the film, I never got around to seeing it until it randomly popped to the top of my Netflix queue this past week, and so the 13-year-old in me finally got to see this movie that he randomly romanticized so frequently while staring at photos of Pitt's delicately-balanced bangs and imagining growing up to be his boyfriend (I'm aware this is an embarrassing story, but I figured you needed an honest entry point as to why I would be watching this movie in 2019).

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is inspired loosely on the memoirs of Heinrich Harrer (Pitt), a mountain climber at the precipice of World War II who goes on an expedition with Peter Aufschnaiter (Thewlis) in British India climbing Nanga Parbat, only to find himself in a POW camp when Britain goes to war with Germany.  Harrer's wife says she wants a divorce, and she has a son who wants nothing to do with him, and so when he escapes the camp he doesn't head back to Austria, but instead into Tibet.  There he becomes acquainted with key Tibetan officials, and begins a tutorship/friendship with the young Dalai Lama (truly random bit of trivia here-the woman who plays the Dalai Lama's mother in the film is actually Jetsun Pema, who is the current Dalai Lama's real-life sister, so she's playing her actual mother in the film).  This takes place at a formative time for the Dalai Lama, as China starts its occupation of Tibet, and so we have the juxtaposition of a young man, viewed as a deity by all around him, learning about the western world which we know as a modern audience will be crucial to his future, as the 14th Dalai Lama would become an international figure and a Nobel laureate.

The film is one that hasn't aged particularly well.  The idea of a white savior coming into a world he doesn't understand, and finding that he can teach the most important figure in that world about his own culture feels off, and a bit inappropriate twenty years later; it's difficult to imagine a film like Seven Years in Tibet being made in the same fashion today.  It's eased a little by the actual Dalai Lama admitting the influence the real-life Harrer had on his life, and the friendship that continued until Harrer's death in 2006 between the two men, but it's hard to not feel a little bit icky knowing that this was part of a long history of such movies where white people tried to insert themselves as the savior to a community of color.

That said, the film is interesting, and Pitt is good in it.  If you can get past the come-and-go German accent (Brad Pitt is a brilliant actor, but he has never been particularly strong at accents) and the impossible hair (unless Tibet happens to be just above Beverly Hills, I doubt it would have been possible to have flawlessly-dyed bangs in remote 1940's Asia), you get a strong performance from him, one that manages to make an unlikable man believably transition into someone of decency, who deserves the happy ending he gets with his son.  And yes, 13-year-old John, you'd be hard-pressed to find a movie where Pitt looked more "movie star gorgeous" than this picture; I would have passed out at the time if I'd watched the scene where he gets tailored for a suit.  The score is incredible (one of Williams's better outings in the 1990's), and the cinematography is lush & divine.  It looks like Netflix will soon have the film's sister picture Kundun available on DVD, so I'll be able to compare, but between the costumes, score, cinematography, and art direction, it's kind of inexcusable that this movie didn't get at least one Oscar nomination back in 1997, even if everyone was mostly enamored with a giant luxury liner sinking in the North Atlantic at the time.