Movie Review of “Doctor
Zhivago”
lthough David Lean’s 40-year
career included among its highlights a small scale
urban romantic melodrama, “Brief Encounter”
(1945), it is as a master of the epic form that he is
remembered, a director of long, lavish historical
dramas whose spectacles of landscape and action,
however, were never allowed to overwhelm their gravity
of character and theme. “Doctor Zhivago” (1965) is the last of the trio of epics that
form the core of this legacy, following “The
Bridge on the River Kwai” (1957) and
“Lawrence of Arabia” (1962).” Each of
these can trace its lineage to more than one genre, but
among these is the war movie. “Bridge” is
set in one of the remote corners of the Second World
War, while “Lawrence” is set in one of the
remote corners of the First, the same time period as
“Zhivago”, which concerns the Russian
Revolution of 1917 and the ensuing civil war. Like war
itself, grim geography lesson that it is, each of these
films is dominated visually by its terrain:
respectively, the jungle, the desert and the steppes.
This is one of
those movies that stands up well to repeated viewings.
I saw it when it first came out and I remember it as
the occasion of my first crush on a movie star. Seeing
Julie Christie here still makes
my heart ache. Her beauty, in fact, can distract one
from her considerable acting skills, as she grows in
this story from awkward schoolgirl to mature young
mother – and that may be exactly what Christie
and Lean had in mind. If a movie makes you look at its
star as an entrancing woman rather than a polished
actress, if it makes you marvel at the gift of her
beauty rather than measure the skill of her work,
isn’t that the greatest acting wizardry of all?
(Which is the same sort of paradox in that old saw
about how the devil’s greatest trick is making
people believe he doesn’t exist.)
Lara Antipov,
née Larisa Feodorovna Guishar, is the hub
holding the other major characters together in this
panorama of Russia before, during and after its Marxist
revolution: Yurii Zhivago (Omar Sharif), the handsome
young upper-class doctor/poet with whom she serves as a
military nurse; Victor Komarovsky (Rod Steiger), the
cynical middle-aged lawyer who shifts his political
allegiance from the czar to the party as easily as he
shifts his sexual allegiance from Lara’s mother
to Lara herself; and Pavel Antipov (Tom Courtenay),
Lara’s student sweetheart and party idealist
– Pasha – who marries her only to leave her
for the revolution, taking the nom de guerre “Strelnikov”
and becoming a much-feared Red commissar.
Pulled into
Lara’s whirlpool as well are Zhivago’s wife
Tonia (Geraldine Chaplin), his son, and his Uncle Kolia
(Ralph Richardson); and the young blue-collar worker
Tania (Rita Tushingham) who may be the daughter of Lara
and Zhivago; and, finally, Zhivago’s
half-brother, party heavyweight Evgraf Zhivago, who
provides the story’s narrative frame,
interviewing the nervous young Tonia at the power plant
where she works, to see if she is who he thinks she is.
To jog her memory, he shows her his copy of Lara, the
popular – and forbidden – book of poems
that Zhivago wrote about her mother.
Insofar as this
story is about Lara and her tragic relationships , this
is a movie about beauty and the power of beauty. This
thematic center pulls other elements of the story into
its orbit so that we come to see everywhere the contest
between beauty and brutality. The beauty of poetry and
the brutality of the regime that censors it. The beauty
of an old mansion and the brutality of the party
zealots who chop it up into a rooming house. The beauty
of Lara and the brutality of Victor as he seduces her
for his passing pleasure. The beauty of Pasha’s
idealism and the brutality of Strelnikov’s
fanaticism as he prowls the steppes in his private
military rail car.
The movie shows us
the seductive power of brutality as well as of beauty.
Summing this up in a subtle way is a scene that comes
late in the movie when Victor comes to Lara’s
little flat, where Yurii is recuperating from fever.
Lara’s old lover, the ravisher of her virginity,
is there to offer both of them his help in getting out
of the country. Yurii haughtily rejects the offer
because of its tainted source. Victor witheringly
denounces his self-righteousness, pointing out that he
indulges it at the expense of the welfare of his
beloved and her child. And I think we too are meant to
find a certain brutality in Zhivago’s stance, his
contemptuous dismissal of pragmatism. He (like all the
other zealots in this story) would no doubt say that he
was honoring principle. Whether it’s a lofty
principle or a base passion, it tramples people (with
their mundane, complex, fragile natures) as surely as
the czar’s dragoons trample the peaceful
demonstrators led by Pasha.
The film not only
examines beauty but embodies it. Almost every frame
could stand on its own artistic merit as a still
photograph (with help from production designer John Box
and cinematographer Freddie Young). Taken together,
they constitute a fabulous gallery of still-life,
portrait, landscape and history paintings. The
procession of images has a stately pace that is not
easy to find in current movies, but no shot is ever a
second too long, and the visual contrasts, as well as
the narrative conflicts, keep the beauty from cloying.
After
Victor’s visit, Yurii and Lara leave her flat to
evade the authorities who are now suspicious of them.
They go back to the country estate where Yurii had been
staying with his wife’s family, who have now
fled. The main house is still boarded up by order of
the local party authorities. It’s winter and the
weather has gotten into it. Snow drifts here and there
in the rooms, blending in with the elegant white
furniture and walls, as the tinkle of icicles blends in
with the tinkle of the crystal chandelier. The scene
has a fairy-tale-like quality that temporarily fuses
elegance and wilderness, danger and innocence, ruin and
rescue. It fuses beauty and beastliness, making the
former seem vulnerable yet persistent and the latter
voracious yet changeable. That night, while the wolves
howl and the beautiful Lara sleeps on the floor under
furs, Yurii gets up restlessly and writes the first of
the Lara poems on a broad bare table in the moonlight.
In this one scene, this becomes one of the few movies
that successfully evokes the inner life of a writer, a
notoriously un-photogenic occupation.
The movie is not
just beautiful to look at but to listen to, as well.
Threaded through it is “Lara’s
Theme,” (by Maurice Jarre), a great song from a
decade that gave us many great movie songs, including
Henry Mancini’s “Moon River” (from
the 1961 “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”)
and “The Days of Wine and Roses” (from the
1962 movie of the same name). One could argue, in fact,
that this was the last decade that generated any
memorable movie songs.
The beauty of this
film is so seductive and so familiar to me by now that
it feels like a three-dimensional space that I ought to
be able to enter. I know that cluttered
dressmaker’s shop in Moscow; the stifling cattle
car bringing its passengers out to the Urals; the quiet
town library where Yurii meets Lara again. I know these
places so well. Why can’t I too inhabit them?
Watching the movie again recently, I felt a little
baffled and resentful, like Tantalus reaching for food
that always recedes from him. The connection between
beauty and brutality in this film is no cartoon
struggle between innocent victim and guilty
perpetrator. I suspect that in its heart hides the
secret that beauty itself is a kind of cruelty.
