Best Keanu: “I am doing this for everyone. I am looking for freedom.”

It’s December 2023, which means it’s been 30 years since Little Buddha was released. Which means the Keanu Reeves you see in this movie — largely unrecognizable, thanks to a fair bit of hair and costuming — is about 30 years removed from the Keanu Reeves we know and love today. That’s the Keanu Reeves of John Wick: Chapter 4, the one whose real-life persona has had its own makeover of late, as he’s often seen parading across the social media feeds, touring with his band Dogstar, looking vaguely like he might need a few months worth of good quality sleep, some high-calorie meals, and a break from whiskey and cigarettes.

The Keanu Reeves on-screen in Little Buddha is I think a step up from starving, and the imagery that surrounds him makes you believe he smells like lotus flowers instead of booze and tobacco. There’s an ethereal quality to most of this film that makes it interesting, its story more powerful than its now-relative obscurity might suggest. This is pretty much a good movie, with some faulty pieces.

There’s the mismatch of the scenes of the family in Seattle, whose young son is tapped as a potential reincarnation of a Tibetan Buddhist teacher, and the flashbacks of the story of the Buddha, where Keanu’s physicality — not merely his attractiveness, but his ability to move with an appealing lanky quality and hold a perfect lotus position — somehow works. Even the halting delivery of poorly-written lines (or perhaps those lines are sacred text, translated into English, I don’t know) somehow works, because he is the Buddha, and isn’t really in all of this for popularity or to be just like everyone else.

I don’t know much about Tibetan Buddhism; maybe more than most, but the details are fuzzy for me and I have to chalk up what I know to mere cursory knowledge. I have born witness to the creation, over several days, of a sand mandala (which I talked about here — you can skip over my ramblings about the truly awful move Dangerous Liaisons and skip to the final sections about That Job I Had Once So Long, Long Ago) and seen it swept up after a grand ceremony. The sweeping is evident in Little Buddha too, in a rarely-seen feature of a film in 1993: the after-credits scene. There’s no full sweep here, but the start of one. It felt a bit makeshift for the camera, and not a true representation of the ceremony, but it is, after all, a movie.

And it’s a good movie. The story of the Buddha is a very powerful one, at least as it’s told here, and if you are largely new to it, as I am, and if you are prepared to take the movie on its face and not get caught up in questions of accuracy and cultural sensitivity. I choose to put those questions aside, because I don’t know the answers or even what questions to ask.

It was hard to find Little Buddha, in the same way that it was nearly impossible to find Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. I definitely prefer the former to the latter, even if you can somewhat pity Chris Isaak and Bridget Fonda for getting the short end of the stick when it came to the movie’s most relevant and moving scenes. The movie is weird, even if you have a religious bent, and the intercut scenes of Seattle somehow make the flashbacks to Prince Siddhartha before he became the Buddha even weirder. The audience doesn’t have enough time to suspend disbelief and become immersed in the other story, and the transition between the two worlds, the two lifetimes, the cultures, the countries, or whatever else is supposed to be represented here, isn’t as seamless as it could or should be. It’s choppy and comes across as a half-baked attempt at introducing Westerners to Tibetan Buddhism when it could have been an entertainment epic with a vague historical basis.

This is, let’s recall, Keanu Reeves one year before Speed, two years after Point Break and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. It’s also Keanu Reeves seven years after that Christmas classic, the truly bizarre Babes in Toyland, which I thought of while watching Little Buddha. There’s nothing Christmasy about Little Buddha, but Keanu commits to this role like he committed to that one; a blogger who wrote about Babes noted the commitment on behalf of Reeves in what was a truly silly and awful movie. In their (paraphrased) words: that’s why Speed worked and Speed 2 didn’t: commitment. For all the potential flaws you can find with Keanu’s performance in Little Buddha, it’s clear he was in it for the work, the art for art’s sake. Like the Buddha, he put his own ego aside.

At this moment, I want to make a comment about the scene of the Buddha swimming in the water and whispering to the buffalo, but anything relevant escapes me. There is a kind of beauty in that moment, like there is when Prince Siddhartha says to his companion: “I am doing this for everyone. I am looking for freedom.” You are committing Keanu, and we can see it.

Now go eat, sleep, and lay off the alcohol and cigarettes.

December 2023