What's the AFI Project, you ask? For more information, or if you just enjoy my bemused ramblings, read here: http://www.spout.com/blogs/pippin06/archive/2008/3/1/25756.aspx
Doctor Zhivago is on the following AFI lists:
The Original Top 100 (#39)
100 Years...100 Passions (#7)
I watched Doctor Zhivago instantly on Netflix. I wasn't really looking forward to it, I have to say. Unusual though it is for me, I started forming some predilections about this film after reading plot summaries and reviews by other members. I like epic romances, and I like examinations of the Russian/Bolshevik revolution. I'd never read the book, and it occurs to me that perhaps I should have prior to watching the film. When I read the plot summaries, though, I started to cringe a little. It all sounded a little schmaltzy, being about a doctor who wants to be a poet. Also, the movie is better than three hours long. But I've come to appreciate David Lean quite a bit through this AFI project (this is his third entry after Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai), so I thought that, perhaps, I was being too prejudicial and too harsh...after all, it made one Greatest list, even if (as I note) it did not make the Revised list.
The plot is actually a little convoluted and dense. The movie begins when Yevgraf Zhivago (Alec Guinness), a general in the Bolshevik army, searches for his illegitimate niece. Finding a likely candidate, who works in the mines and is frightened out of her wits, he tries to convince her of her proposed lineage by telling the tale, through flashback, of his half-brother Yuri (Omar Sharif), her potential father. We find out that Yuri was orphaned at a young age and carries around a balalaika willed to him by his mother. Raised by her friends, he studies to be a doctor, though he yearns to be a poet and arranges to marry his adoptive sister (already weird!) Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin). Shocked though he is by the rising violence between Bolshevik revolutionaries and tsarist loyalists, Doctor Zhivago is even more shocked when a young seamstress, Lara (Julie Christie) and the potential mother, invades a Christmas Eve party to shoot corrupt politician Komarovsky (Rod Steiger), who had raped her and had been carrying on an unsavory tryst with her in the meantime, though she has been engaged to a Bolshevik idealist named Pascha (Tom Courtenay). It seems Yuri is quite taken with Lara, because later in the movie, when he goes to World War (I think the first one) for Russia, and Lara volunteers as a nurse to search for her missing husband (who has joined an underground Bolshevik extremist sect), they become taken with each other. Then, after war has ravaged Russia, now overtaken by socialist/communist idealism at the hands of the successful Bolshevik revolutionaries, and Yuri and his family, once rich, must escape the all for all concepts of the new order, they move away to their former summer home (more specifically the servants' cottage), not too far from a village where Yuri finds Lara again. They have an affair against the backdrop of violence and revolution, exemplified by Yevgraf and later Strelnikoff (formerly Pascha).
I was trying to be brief, but at 3.5 hours, it's hard to do that. Besides, the novel is 600 pages (in paperback form), so why shouldn't the movie be long too?
In the end, I didn't like this movie all that much, or at least on balance. I'm going to rate it a 6.5, between cute/mediocre and shaky/entertaining. This is the last rating I can give before the ratings deteriorate into mediocrity. My explanation is that I don't think this is altogether a bad movie, and it's certainly a few steps above mediocrity as an overall product. David Lean's gift and trademark of employing beautiful photography to paint a picture of epic proportions is the best part of this movie. Using the backdrop of wide open, snowy spaces and dark and ominous city streets punctuated by the red of the Communists to give the film its reputed grandeur made the film visually beautiful, even stunning. The visual aspects are what put the film above mediocrity, the film deserved its Best Cinematography and Art Direction Oscars for the attention to detail paid to backgrounds and foregrounds alike.
I also liked the costumes, particularly Lara's many ensembles, and the score. I think the score was my favorite production element because it was sweeping and romantic as the film ought to have been or tried to be. The composer won the Oscar for Best Score, which seems well deserved.
What I didn't like about this movie was pretty much everything else. The story, whether in how it was executed or the story itself, didn't appeal to me on a basic level, but since that's my own bias (and I recognized that even before I started watching the film), I tried to ignore that bias and get into the film on its own merit. The trouble is, the story was not executed very well, possibly because some of it was sacrificed to the visual presentation, as Lean really tried to contrast this clandestine romance against the historical and even environmental backdrop; possibly because it was not well adapted (even if Oscar thought so) from the book; or possibly because it was trying to be like Gone with the Wind and just couldn't make it. If it was the latter, it shouldn't have tried, because Gone with the Wind's magical ingredients came by once in a lifetime and could never be duplicated.
I digress. Let me put it more succinctly - what there was of the story was sometimes confusing, incomplete, and didn't make sense, and it was helped by some of the dialogue, which struck me as overblown and cheesy and, frankly, not how people would talk. Plus, all of the performances felt oddly soap operaish except for Sharif's and Guinness' - as in, it all felt like too much, too heavy handed. For the record, I don't like soap operas, so this really turned me off almost instantly.
I guess my biggest problem with the plot or story or execution of either was that it was never explained or made sense as to why Yuri suddenly felt this magnetic attraction to Lara that couldn't be forgotten and why he would committ adultery for her when he seemed to love his wife so much (and why shouldn't he, she was lovely). Since this is the basis for the whole film, it really bothered me. In the film, we go from this Christmas party, which really does more to establish Lara's character and its complexities and the struggle between her loss of innocence and struggle to hold onto it, to the war. We then see a scene in which Yuri encounters Lara again, and they explain their reasons for enlisting. We then see a camp, an old mansion, where it is implied they've lived for weeks if not months, and all of a sudden, Yuri has grown lustful of Lara, when no basis for such a change in events has really been established. Now, I suppose some may argue that Yuri's a poet, he sees the world differently and is much more given to his passions, but it just seemed to come from left field. It made no sense, especially when he clearly loved his wife as well. Thus, the sweeping grandeur of this romance was lost on me, and I can barely understand much less agree with the film's placement on the Love Stories list.
I know it's part of the man and the character that he was so full of love, he had room in his heart for both women, and to his credit, Omar Sharif was able to show those complexities and make the viewer feel as Yuri was feeling most of the time. I just felt like something really big was missing, that I should have been shown rather than had to guess at, that would have aided my ability to suspend disbelief. As a result, I found the remaining half or two hours of the movie a drudgery, except for the scenes with Alec Guinness. I wish that there could have been more excuses to put him on screen because his Yevgraf was electric - cold, calculating, and yet oddly soft at times. Instead, his purpose was to be the narrator, and that was mildly disappointing, to say the least.
I don't know if any of this makes any sense, but the fact that the movie didn't make the Revised list doesn't surprise me. It's a good movie on balance, like I said, but I can't be sold on its supposed greatness, and I was never entertained, really. By the end, I was just happy that I hadn't turned it off. This sounds more scathing than it's meant to be, but the truth is, I think Doctor Zhivago appeals more to another generation or time - no specific generation or time, but one outside this one for sure. Plus, I think there was a different set of voters working on the Revised list - some that were more recently-focused, for good or for worse. Doctor Zhivago doesn't pass the test, obviously, and I gave it a 6.5 for being more than shaky (given the plot holes or weaknesses) but better than cute/mediocre (given the production elements that really soared). I know I'm probably blaspheming left and right, but this is my blog and my reel thoughts. If you love sweeping epic romances that don't seem to make sense, and that are set against a backdrop of violence and turmoil (and possibly belie social commentary about the Cold War), then this film is for you. If you love epic romances that are better executed all around, I recommend Gone with the Wind. Otherwise, you, like me, will probably not care for Doctor Zhivago too much in the end.