MOVIE REVIEW : A Spiritual Reflection on Life of Krishnamurti

Movies about philosophy are so rare that “Krishnamurti: With a Silent Mind” (Monica Showcase) gets points for daring its subject at all. This multi-faceted portrait of the late philosopher-teacher-world traveler J. Krishnamurti mixes archival footage of his life and early years, videotapes, TV shows and interviews, with extracts from his notebooks, read with studied lyricism over quiet pastoral scenes.

Krishnamurti is a more fascinating subject than he might first seem, yet the film is ultimately too worshipful. Producer Evelyne Blau and director Michael Mendizza want to spread the word, get us to accept Krishnamurti--or “K” as his acolytes reverently-affectionately call him--as a great man. To that end, they’ve enlisted several dozen interviewees, who either discuss K.’s life or praise him to the skies. These interviewees, never identified until the end credits, distract from the story and subject--as if the “witnesses” from Warren Beatty’s “Reds” took over the whole last half of the movie.

It’s a shame. As we see it here, the story of Krishnamurti’s early years--from his birth in India in 1895 to his great public crisis in 1929--has the subtle twists and turns, the absorbing ironies of a great philosophical-psychological drama.

A Brahmin Hindu from a civil servant’s family, the 16-year-old K. and his younger brother were spotted near the Ganges one day by a pan-religious British group called the Theosophists, who immediately recruited him as the potential next World Teacher, in the Christ-Buddha line. He was brought to England, sheltered, shown off, educated, indoctrinated. Meanwhile, his little brother, left behind on a tour in San Francisco, died alone: a loss that shattered him.

In 1929, after Krishnamurti had assumed the leadership of the order of the Star, he announced that he was dissolving it. Apparently, he renounced his own destiny, resigned as World Teacher--while then embarking on the same path, teaching around the world, which his patrons had mapped out for him. His creed preached the renunciation of all creeds, the abandonment of preconceptions, mistrust of potential messiahs. He died in 1986; his admirers apparently included such crusty skeptics as Bernard Shaw, Henry Miller and novelist Howard Fast--interviewed in this movie.

This is a clearly a great story, rife with possibilities for barbed social satire, and psychological revelation, but after the first half of “Krishnamurti,” Mendizza and Blau don’t follow it up. The last 47 years of Krishnamurti’s life are never examined in depth.

Neither, unfortunately, is his philosophy. We learn, vaguely, that he advocates emptying the mind; wise-crackers will see empty minds behind the entire project. They’re wrong, but we’d like to know what happened to K. afterwards, how he detached himself from the group and how the Krishnamurti Foundation--which publishes his writings, distributes his tapes and, not coincidentally, produced this movie--was formed. What happened to K.’s old patroness, Annie Besant? What happened to the Order of the Star?

Those are subjects other movies, unfortunately. What we see here certainly piques the interest, but it doesn’t fully satisfy either the mind or soul.

Still, there’s something admirable about a film that so completely disproves the old adage about the difference between European and American films. European films, it is said, begin with a shot of clouds, then dissolve to clouds, then dissolve to more clouds. American movies begin with clouds, then cut to an airplane, and finally cut to the plane exploding. In “Krishnamurti: With a Silent Mind” (Times-rated: Family), Mendizza and Blau start us off with more clouds than even a Swedish pastoralist or Japanese Buddhist director like Yasujiro Ozu would have dared.