Shoot the Commander

Rating: Null/10 (19 August 2007)

This is a pretty complicated movie. Oh, it isn't complicated in itself, in fact it is maddeningly trite a scandalous reduction of book that had many depths. Where Pasternak mapped personal challenges to great sweeps of society, where he set a contrast between humanity and "shared story," where he wove a complicated, rich notion of love, where he had deep self-reference in the power of the words of the story and the poems in the story....
All this is taken away by Lean and Bolt. What we get is the book that would have been written (and movie made) if it had been made by a soulless filmmaker under a Soviet commissar. Sure, the pictures are lovely, but they have no relationship to the humans in them. In fact, quiet the opposite is the case: everything is so artificially framed spatially and temporally that we know that none of this is the beauty the world presents and we discover: this is fabricated beauty, the kind that isn't embodied. Its the kind that you can watch and like, eyes engaged. But it is not what you can digest into your life and take to your partner.
But the fact that it is so inhuman and uncomplex is what to a viewer makes it incredibly complex and in the end possibly reregisters the humanity in us.
First the world. Lean is in the tradition of the British empire; that's how his world is constituted. "Lawrence" worked, because it... Well, it was about impressing a British sense on odd desert creatures, a storyform that even today (especially today) that ill fits. It had as its focus, a man bridging the stories, nay, oscillating in a great space between the two and also between self and nature, challenge and acceptance, wisdom and intuition. "Lawrence," in other words, as a story about these manystories being fit into a dull mold, fit Lean's story, so he could tell it.
So when we watch this, we see several things. First is the novel behind this that is something of a masterpiece of interwoven destinies, and hence multiple narrative nodes corresponding to the shifting moral environments. Second is the movie, a collection of poses with pop music. Third is the movie that might have been: Brando as the manipulator, O'Toole as the writer within striving toward human embodiment, Tarkovsky as the director showing his truly revolutionary dreamstyle, and (don't laugh) Sophia Loren as the lover beyond love. The screenwriter? Why Nabokov of course.
Some other movies: the one about Christie, considered in the day a beauty. In retrospect, two things take away. Then, the notion of beauty was in the eyes, hence her lips were erased in fleshcolored makeup. Today, acting beautiful is all about lips, and actresses who know how to use them. Also, her hair is glued together. Strange how these things change and the reference for fantasy shifts. But Christie really is an intelligent woman and in some situations and intelligent actress. Not here, Lean wouldn't allow it, but at least we have Sarah Polley out of the deal.
Its a strange situation. Lean has his "Lawrence" on my list of films you must see. But the rest just isn't worth much. I'll give him this: he uses trains more forcefully and with more agency than anyone else ever has. And here too.
One actor is good in spite of Lean. Watch an early Klaus Kinski magnetize the space around him. And imagine his future after he leaves the train and the pressgang, going on to give us two of the most amazing films in history.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.