Flawed But Still A Very Good Movie

Rating: 7/10 (12 March 2005)

Russian literature ? I know of it but haven't read too much of it . From what I'm told Tolstoy , Dostoyevski et al don't exactly make for good bed time reading . I guess Boris Pasternak keeps up this tradition with his novel DOCTOR ZHIVAGO being a bit too top heavy with characters and incidents and it's this that has led to many critics putting the boot into the film on its initial release
You could say that David Lean is the natural director for this kind of movie since he gives the word " Epic " a whole new meaning . Unfortunately he's not exactly the type of director who can make a tight script even tighter . The story contains a few too many characters and subplots ( Though this is probably the fault of the studio and screenwriter Robert Block more than Lean's )that leaves the audience wondering if it's a love story or a history lesson . It should also be pointed out that despite having some very memorable scenes like the frozen Russian bodies in a winter landscape , the train door covered in ice and the White Russian kids being machine gunned you still have to sit through a lot of talky scenes .
However I'm going to be kind . DOCTOR ZHIVAGO works best when we're shown the birth of the Soviet Union , a wonderful ideal born out of the carnage from the Great War that ended up becoming in many ways even more terrible than Nazi Germany . Pasha starts by naively handing out seditious pamphlets speaking out against the Tsarist police state and ends up by becoming a communist despot , a good piece of character study showing that when people are given total power it will consume them totally . Oh and let's not forget the cast all of them are convincing but there's too many to mention by name so I'll just point out that Guiness is as superb as always and Stieger is absolutely breath taking , and it's shocking to think this great character actor went onto to star in straight to video films in the 1980s and 90s . Strangely the one performance I will always remember in this film is a cameo by Klaus Kinski as a prisoner on the train !
So a very good film but not a classic mainly down to the fact that has many memorable scenes surrounded by even more stodgy scenes . In other words you'll remember the great parts long after you've forgotten the boring bits which means you'll be slightly disappointed after seeing it again several years later