Never Has Infidelity Been So Beautiful...Or So Boring

Rating: 5/10 (22 September 2015)

David Lean made BIG movies. And by "big," I mean not only large in scope but usually insufferably long as well. That being said, it is not possible to give any of his films less than five stars because his visuals are always great and he was also a master of directing actors.
DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, one of Lean's lesser efforts, is a lovely-to-look-at but interminably long (at three hours and seventeen minutes) story of a man cheating on his wife. A great deal of justification for the affair is written into the script (as it was in the novel), but at the end of the day, we have a man who to all intents and purposes loves his wife and children who suddenly finds his "true love" in another woman.
After an opening frame scene in which Zhivago's brother Yevgraf (Alec Guinness) interviews a young girl (Rita Tushingham) whom he suspects might be his brother's love child with Lara (Julie Christie), the main story begins with the funeral of Yuri Zhivago's mother (Tarek Sharif played the eight-year-old Yuri); it is a lovely, austere, and painfully slow-moving scene that is a harbinger of things to come. After the poor woman is finally in the ground, the young orphan is taken to live with the Gromyko family. They have a young daughter about Yuri's age named Tonya, and to cut to the chase, when they grow up, Yuri and Tonya marry and start a family as he begins his career in medicine (and writing poetry on the side). The marriage is a happy one and Yuri genuinely loves his wife and children.
Meanwhile we see Lara, a poor young woman helping her mother in her dress shop and engaged to a young radical named Pasha (Tom Courtenay). Lara's mother is having an affair with a wealthy businessman named Komarovsky (Rod Steiger), and before we know what's what he makes moves on Lara.
To sum up the rest of the plot in a nutshell, a good deal happens before Lara and Yuri finally meet, but when they do they inexplicably fall madly in love and Lara ends up being the inspiration for a poem written by Yuri.
The whole thing plays out against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution. I have noticed that movies about this period tend to be long and rather dull, with a lot of long sequences in which little more is seen than vast expanses of snow (REDS is another of these pictures).
I am being too harsh, perhaps. This film has a lot of good things: the acting is flawless, the script is a fair adaptation of Pasternak's book, and the story, when Lean allows it to move, is compelling stuff. Plus it is beautifully shot and graced with an achingly romantic score by Maurice Jarre.
Unfortunately at the end of the day what we have is a rather sordid tale of a man cheating on his wife and the excuse for his betrayal is that he is a poet and a dreamer. And Lean takes more than three hours to tell this story.
Lovely to look at, but the story is not the grand romance it is made out to be and the film itself is mostly a crashing bore. But this is a highly subjective review; many people loved this film and a lot of folks hated it. I'm sort of in the middle; some of it is very good but ultimately it never seems worth the time it takes to watch it.