But it never quite makes them seem frightened and ignorant and vulnerable and bewildered.
The movie dresses its actors in furs and skins, and has them walk about barefoot and talk in monosyllables. This isn't the first Cro-Magnon, it's the first Rhodes Scholar. In her spare time, she invents arithme tic and becomes chief adviser to the medicine man. On another day, she challenges the tribe's attitudes about sex, seniority and even about self-defense. One day she sneaks out and practices on the slingshot. She can't understand why the men get to have all the fun, and use all the weapons, and make all the decisions. The girl is adopted into the tribe, and right away she causes trouble. 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. It also packs a lot of things into a short span of that long-ago time. 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 tells a nice little modern parable about a distant past that is hardly less idealistic than the Garden of Eden. It isn't grim enough about what things were probably like back then. 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 approaches those times with a modern sensibility.
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