The Clan Of The Cave Bear

What was it like, back there at the dawn of time? What was it like to be a human being, and yet have none of the things we take for granted, such as houses, feminism and shoes? How did we take that first great leap out of the caves and into the Iron Age? Or, if you really want to get idealistic about it, that leap out of the rain and into the caves? "The Clan of the Cave Bear" attempts to answer those questions by making a great leap backward in the imagination, to that precise moment when the first Cro-Magnons were moving in, and the last Neanderthals were becoming obsolete. Unfortunately, the movie never really does reconcile itself to the prehistoric past.

It approaches those times with a modern sensibility. It shows us a woman winning respect from a patriarchal tribe, when, in reality, the men would have just banged her over the head real good. It isn't grim enough about what things were probably like back then. It tells a nice little modern parable about a distant past that is hardly less idealistic than the Garden of Eden. Instead of people who are scarred, wind-burned, thin and toothless, it gives us graduates of the Los Angeles health club scene, and a heroine who looks as if she just walked over from makeup.

It also packs a lot of things into a short span of that long-ago time. Although whole eons were available to it, the movie covers just a few short seasons, as a wandering tribe of primitive Neanderthals encounters an amazing sight: a Cro-Magnon woman (Daryl Hannah), tall and blond and smarter than they are. The girl is adopted into the tribe, and right away she causes trouble.

She can't understand why the men get to have all the fun, and use all the weapons, and make all the decisions. One day she sneaks out and practices on the slingshot. On another day, she challenges the tribe's attitudes about sex, seniority and even about self-defense. In her spare time, she invents arithme tic and becomes chief adviser to the medicine man. This isn't the first Cro-Magnon, it's the first Rhodes Scholar.

The movie dresses its actors in furs and skins, and has them walk about barefoot and talk in monosyllables. But it never quite makes them seem frightened and ignorant and vulnerable and bewildered. To capture the sense of wonder of those days when the human race reached its turning point, "The Clan of the Cave Bear" needs great images, not tidy little dramatic scenes with predictable conclusions. It needs sights such as the opening of "2001: A Space Odyssey," when the bone went flying into the air.