I'll give this movie two stars because it teems with beautiful photography. Otherwise, it teems mainly with clichés and stereotypes: mountain people are either dumb white trash of the fanatically religious or ragged racist kind, or wise white Indians. Indians are magical people who move around without a sound, can disappear in the blink of an eye, talk to animals, and read minds over large distances. And so on and so forth.<br /><br />Throughout the movie I kept wondering what the point of the film was (other than showing me pretty pictures of mountains, log cabins, woods, an assortment of animals, free-spirited mountain-dwellers and freaky people in church).<br /><br />The plot touched a whole range of issues but explored none of them in depth. This was neither a story about growing up during the depression, nor about about being an orphan, nor about a struggle for identity. It tried to be all of those things and more, which made it superficial and unsatisfactory.<br /><br />Although the movie was supposed to be about Little Tree's education, we learn almost nothing about it. He was given a brief summary of the history of his people (who were brave and stoic) and a distillery demonstration; tried his hand at chopping wood (at which he failed) and whiskey running (literally); learned how to read (and maybe to write) with the help of grandma and her dictionary - and that was it. Apparently he didn't learn much during his stint in boarding school because he was locked up in the attic.<br /><br />However, grandma and grandpa and Graham Greene's character made sure that in the end Little Tree became a very spiritual person whose main goal as an adult - after, and I'm paraphrasing here, "riding with the Navajos" and "getting caught up in a couple of wars" - was to "catch up" with grandma and grandpa and Graham Greene's character in heaven (instead of, say, dating girls, getting married, having children or other such nonsense).<br /><br />Last but not least I must say that I found grandpa's trade offensive. Why of all things did it have to be a whiskey still? To counteract the stereotype of the "drunken Indian"?