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Faith & the Muse
As a piece in the puzzle of Martin Scorsese, whom many call American's greatest filmmaker, Kundun is an unusually illuminating glimpse into a man's artistic and personal struggle.



KUNDUN
Written By Melissa Mathison
Directed By Martin Scorsese

MARTIN SCORSESE'S KUNDUN is many things: a character study of the extraordinary child who became the 14th Dalai Lama, an historical drama of China and Tibet, and an exploration of religious faith, with flashes of violence to remind us of the true nature of mankind. It's a patient movie with a strong point of view: It unfolds entirely through the eyes of the Kundun, which means "the presence," telling its story in tantalizing snippets, asking you to pay attention and follow its clear but sparing threads.

Kundun fills a magnificent visual canvas, recreating many Tibetan religious and musical rituals. Roger Deakins' cinematography suffuses it all with a handsome array of shadows, sunbeams and flickers of candlelight. How can you look for very long at the sight of the teenage Kundun, the political and spiritual leader of his people, surrounded by a field of symmetrically arranged dead Tibetan bodies? Yet Scorsese makes us watch, opening the scene on the young man's feet and slowly pulling the camera back to create a sickening bird's-eye view of the slaughter.

But at an even more provocative level--as a piece in the puzzle of Martin Scorsese, whom many call American's greatest filmmaker--Kundun isan unusually illuminating glimpse into a man's artistic and personal struggle.

In his most famous films, like Raging Bull, GoodFellas and Taxi Driver, Scorsese explores (creates?) a culture where blood and anger flow like a river. He sees little hope for humanity, and he asks us to witness, in film after film, the bleakness of the world. Then, in movies like The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun, Scorsese becomes someone else: He escapes into myth and religion to contemplate people who live with God and practice a philosophy of pacifism and love.

It seems that Scorsese feels he has no alternative but to turn to religious figures to explore the better nature of man. It's fascinating to contemplate this artist's conflict, and to wonder if he'll ever transgress the cavern between his own philosophical yin and yang.

At the center of Kundun isthe current Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet in 1959 to save his life and continue leading his people in exile, and whom Tibetan Buddhists believe is the 14th reincarnation of the Buddha. He was revealed to be the new Buddha in 1937, at age 3, by monks who were spiritually drawn to his family's home on the Chinese border. The monks took him and his family away so the boy could begin to understand his importance to his people and to immerse himself in the philosophy of his Buddhist faith.

A bright and curious child, with a touch of petulance, he declares where he likes to sit at family dinners (the head of the table) and orders his mother to recite the story of his birth for the umpteenth time. His impish nature doesn't change when he begins his religious training. But as he grows into a older child and a teenager, he develops an interest in movies, maps, radio and politics, for he is, after all, not only Tibet's god, but its head of state as well.

Then Mao's Communists win their revolution. They declare Tibet to be a part of China and begin reunification. They promise to reform and modernize the isolated nation, whether the people like it or not. In their first meeting, Mao and the Kundun seem to forge a cordial relationship. But later, just to be sure the Kundun understands, Mao meets with him alone and whispers menacingly in his ear: "Religion is poison." After that, the resistance--and the massacre--begins.

The few short dialogues in Kundun between Mao and the Dalai Lama are like watching a recreation of the most elusive moments in 20th-century history. From a land so far away, with people so unlike us, Scorsese distills their conflict to a battle between two sincere people, only one of whom is right. He presents most of his violence abstractly, telling rather than showing how Chinese soldiers force monks and nuns to copulate in public, or how they order children to shoot their parents. This visual restraint is so unlike Scorsese that the flashes of violence we do finally see in Kundun are even more shocking.

By Hollywood standards, Kundun isan epic, although the cast consists entirely of Tibetan, Chinese and Indian actors--many of them inexperienced, but all very expressive and well-directed. It has at once the sweep of history and the intimacy of people's lives being changed by events beyond their control. Only Philip Glass' musical score conspires against Scorsese's measured approach: The music is either mesmerizing or monotonous, depending upon how you find Glass. But it's almost always too much, a monumental symphonic accent to a story that begs to be told quietly in every way.

The way Tibetans choose a Kundun--the way wise old monks simply find their way to the reincarnated Buddha child and then carry him off to their monasteries--is more mysterious even than the way the Holy Roman Church fills the shoes of the fisherman. So what will it be like when it comes time to find the 15th Dalai Lama, who will be the first chosen under the gaze of TV cameras? Will the world be too cynical to believe it's possible? Will China even let Tibetans continue the tradition? And how will Tibetans flourish spiritually while they wait for their little Buddha to grow up and inspire them? These are intriguing things to think about in the long shadow of Scorsese's fine picture.

BRINGING OUT THE DEAD
With Nicolas Cage, Patricia Arquette, Ving Rhames
Screenplay by Paul Schrader, from the novel by Joe Connelly
Directed by Martin Scorsese

LIKE THE cocaine addicts, AIDS children, pregnant prostitutes, bloody accident victims and the crazy guy strapped to a stretcher and screaming for water in the emergency room of Our Lady of Misery Hospital in Hell's Kitchen, Frank Pierce might as w ell be dead.

But Frank (Nicolas Cage) is one of the good guys - a fatigued and ambivalent EMT with five years on the night shift who can't get his boss to fire him no matter how many times he shows up late. He rides his ambulance with a series of loony-tune partners: Larry (John Goodman), a jovial whale who likes to laugh and eat; Walls (Tom Sizemore), a loose cannon who gets high on blood and gore; and Marcus (Ving Rhames), a Jesus-lovin' maniac who preaches the gospel over the unconscious body of drug addict and pre tends to bring him back from the dead.

If any other two people had made Bringing Out the Dead, we'd probably dismiss it as ersatz Scorsese or Tarantino. But the director here is Martin Scorsese, and the screenwriter is Paul Schrader, both of whom collaborated in 1976 on T axi Driver, which has since become a small piece of American film history.

Now they've tried to do Taxi Driver again, only with a darker spin for a darker era, and with all the style and energy that money, reputation and habit can buy.

In Taxi Driver, the insomniac narrator Travis Bickle haunted the streets of New York, embittered about all the filth he saw and desperate to save somebody's life. In Bringing Out the Dead, the compassionate narrator Frank witnesses the s ame urban abominations (although that part of New York has now been "cleaned up" by Mayor Giuliani). But where the whacked-out, self-obsessed Travis merely imagined that he saved a teen-age girl named Iris, the torturously lucid Frank knows for certain th at he failed to save a teen-age girl named Rose. Two men, two flowers, two different outcomes. If the ironies were any thicker you'd have to eat them with a fork.

Like the two filmmakers - Scorsese a devout former Catholic, Schrader a screwed-up former Calvinist - these two movies together make odd bookends. Taxi Driver is a profound character study with social implications; Bringing Out the Dead is a frenzied farrago of styles and ideas searching for something more than the most hackneyed threads of meaning. So after all the torment of his odyssey through a city from which nobody escapes alive, Frank ends up resting in a beatific glow, like somet hing from The Last Temptation of Christ. (S & S collaborated on that one, too.)

After years of TV shows about emergency rooms and movies like The Hospital, all that's left to appreciate in Bringing Out the Dead is the adventure of watching Scorsese and his team construct their visually scintillating parable of New Y ork at night. This isn't the charming romantic New York of a Julia Roberts movie: The squalor is unrelenting, and Dante Ferretti, the famous production designer, doesn't create a single set that looks like a place you'd want to inhabit, although many of t hem - even the ones on the street - are people's homes.

From time to time Schrader's script, which he adapted faithfully from a novel by Joe Connelly, gropes around for the morose wit of Scorsese's masterful black comedy After Hours. But most of the gallows humor in Bringing Out the Dead feels more li ke pieces of a routine than a unified plan of attack. Profuse with metaphors, it's even more profuse with irony: In the end, Frank learns that he can't do anything about the unrelenting misery he encounters, but that shroud of personal suffering he wears so well is his to do with as he pleases.

To tell a story about such moribund souls, the last thing Scorsese needed was Nicolas Cage and Patricia Arquette (as an intermittent drug addict whose father Frank hopes to save by killing him). These soporific stars should only do comedies that take the edge off their sullen, mumbly acting. Mary Beth Hurt has a small role as an admitting nurse who gives snide lectures to patients whose lifestyles disturb her. And if you listen carefully to the dispatcher on the radio - ordering Frank what to do whether h e likes it or not - you'll recognize the cutting voice of Scorsese himself, directing his characters the way he directs his actors.

Thank goodness for the presence of Ving Rhames, a freaky actor who usually growls and scowls in his movies, and who in Bringing Out the Dead attains a wonderful new level of menacing amusement. He seems to act like an early '70s "blaxploitation" film leftover: With his stubby cigar and his Pomade-soaked hair, he's Huggy Bear in a uniform, and he provides the only purposeful laughs in a movie that mostly just bleeds to death.