This moving story is full of breathtaking compositions, gorgeous spectacle, and inspiring philosophies articulated by sympathetic figures.

Annaud (The Lover, The Name of the Rose, Quest for Fire) may be, with all due respect to Stanley Kubrick, the most talented adapter of literary source material in recent film history. Seven Years confirms his mastery by doling out a perfect ratio of moving interpersonal drama and visual enchantment.

The movie is a star vehicle at heart, aimed more at marketing Pitt's popularity than probing complexities of empire-building and cultural clash that trouble the Tibetan region to this day.

Beyond his struggles with an unwieldy accent and the screenplay's hokum, Mr. Pitt gives a sincere if labored performance enhanced by a sense of genuine struggle.

French director Jean-Jacques Annaud, who brought his interest in self-discovery and untamed places to Quest for Fire, The Lover, and the IMAX 3-D film Wings of Courage, is at his best re-creating the serene exoticism of the Dalai Lama's Tibet. But the spark of the holy that the Dalai Lama lights in Harrer flickers only fitfully in all the wind in this production.

Seven Years in Tibet is an ambitious and beautiful movie with much to interest the patient viewer, but it makes the common mistake of many films about travelers and explorers: It is more concerned with their adventures than with what they discover.

Seven Years in Tibet, however flawed, has feeling and purpose. It bears witness.

The bad news is that Pitt, despite this film's high-minded intentions (there are Yo-Yo Ma cello solos on the soundtrack, and China expert Orville Schell acted as an advisor during the shoot), or more likely because of them, finds himself trapped in a long, earnest movie that fails to ever feel very alive.

Despite some magnificent widescreen lensing, faultless ethnographic detail and a timely sympathy for the plight of the Tibetan people, director Jean-Jacques Annaud's true-life tale about a self-obsessed Austrian mountaineer who learns selflessness in the Himalayas too rarely delivers at a simple emotional level.

Unfortunately, Harrer's inner struggle isn't as grand as the sweep of Jean-Jacques Annaud's direction.

Unfortunately, this visually sumptuous epic is the very definition of a "prestige production," swaddled in good taste and better intentions.

Pitt isn't a bad actor, but he's way out of his depth and never disappears into the character -- a selfish rogue who gets a jolt of enlightenment at the feet of the Dalai Lama -- the way a superior actor like Daniel Day-Lewis might have.

Becky Johnston ( "The Prince of Tides" ) did creditable work on the screenplay, but there are times when this story about a truly rotten fellow seems to be one big jump cut.

Though Pitt is as attractive as ever, "Seven Years" offers other things to look at and in fact functions better as a travelogue than as a drama.