3/5/2023 0 Comments The clan of the cave bear(She even triumphs over the pounds of makeup that age her to look eerily like Yoda.) Waites as the savagely jealous Broud, and Pamela Reed as Ayla’s foster mother, the medicine woman Iza, who becomes a beautifully realized character. There is James Remar as the shaman Creb Thomas G. And that’s in spite of the best efforts of its actors although Hannah’s hair and makeup would let her go unnoticed on any college campus today, she is able to give Ayla strength, resourcefulness and credibility. The film is less a trip back to alien cultures than a wilderness weekend with some fairly hirsute and surly company. (In the beautiful details from the Lascaux and Pech-Merle cave paintings under the credits, you’re also aware that the film makers are a bit off, since this breathtaking work is Paleolithic, about 18,000 years off.) In “Clan of the Care Bear,” for all the huddling and hunkering and smoke-filled caves, you are always aware of costumes, makeup, unspoiled locations. The camera work is by the usually flawless Jan De Bont (“Keetje Tipple,” “Max Havelaar,” “The Fourth Man”). It has others that are downright peculiar, such as its crucial earthquake, created by jiggling the camera until vertigo grips the audience (OK, jiggling the camera and a fissure or two). “Clan of the Cave Bear” has its moments: the hunting of the giant musk ox, as the men scatter before the animal’s utter unpredictability. You could feel the wretchedness of those tribes, exposed to piercing rain and cold you almost smelled their soggy furs, like living under 40 pounds of wet Airedale, and you understood their triumph in something as simple as fire. The real problem for “Clan of the Cave Bear,” of course, is “Quest for Fire,” whose simplicity and magnificence as both drama and anthropology created an almost impossible precedent. They’ve kept the book’s furry feminism, in which Ayla emerges like some splendid Frank Frazetta woman superwarrior, and they’ve lost its immediacy. Chapman also misses capturing anything like cinematic electricity. ![]() What Sayles and director Michael Chapman have lost, however, is Auel’s scrupulous detail about day-to-day life out here at the edge of prehistory, as one people faded out and another emerged to take its place. Screenwriter John Sayles has had sense enough not to fall into that trap, and he has whipped Auel’s almost 500 pages into something resembling a manageable narrative, conveyed by gestures, grunted words, subtitles and a throaty voice-over (spoken by Salome Jens). While her characters had names like Iza, Oga, Goov and Creb, the great Mog-ur, their conversations, in the depths of Neanderthal caves, had an odd, trailer-park chattiness: Research was her strong point dialogue was not. Auel used more or less straightforward English for her detailed story of life 35,000 years ago.
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