The Film
Epic films have their share of inherent flaws. They often tend to lack nuance despite the sublimity that their grand scope all but ensures, but David Lean discovered that he could have it both ways and created some of the most memorable epics ever — both magnanimously stirring and intimately personal
While Doctor Zhivago doesn’t quite get the same adoration that Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai or Lawrence of Arabia do, it’s a film that’s in the same class, and it achieves a visual grandeur that has been rarely matched for its sumptuousness.
Told against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution, Doctor Zhivago is based on the novel by Boris Pasternak, and tells the story of poet and doctor Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif). Amidst the outbreak of WWI, Zhivago marries his childhood friend Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin), enlists and serves as a battlefield doctor and falls in love with the beautiful Lara (Julie Christie), a nurse whom he had previously met in Moscow.
Doctor Zhivago is certainly guilty of romanticizing history, and subordinates its hazily defined historical moments to the love between individuals, but Robert Bolt’s screenplay has a sweeping quality that draws you right in. Does it reduce the importance of history? Perhaps, but it’s hard to care when looking at Lean’s gorgeous compositions.
The passage of time is conveyed with a visual eloquence that plants snowy landscapes next to golden fields, and it’s with this scale that Lean reminds us that these characters are simply being swept along by history. Zhivago’s story matters, but he is not an agency-charged hero defining history around him, and it’s this subtlety that gives Lean’s epic the nuance that helps set it apart.
Sharif and Christie often come across as larger-than-life presences on the screen, but it’s the supporting actors that really make an impression, especially Rod Steiger’s thoroughly loathsome lawyer Komarovsky and Chaplin’s very moving Tonya. Tom Courtenay also does strong work as the young Bolshevik Pasha, who wins Lara’s heart despite his emotional asceticism.
Doctor Zhivago occasionally has trouble breaking out of its literary bounds, and nowhere is this more evident than in the somewhat flaccid frame story featuring Zhivago’s half-brother (Alec Guinness) searching for the illegitimate child of Yuri and Lara.
Still, the film is the kind of large-scale masterpiece that Hollywood has little hope of recreating today. Lean delivers stunning image after stunning image, making the nearly three-and-a-half hour Zhivago a totally immersive filmic experience.The Blu-ray Disc
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