The greatest romantic story of our time? I don't think so.

Rating: 2/10 (21 June 2004)

I expected some pretty great things from the film Doctor Zhivago; not only is it on the American Film Institute Top 100 Films of all time, but it has a pretty solid reputation as a good film. Unfortunately, I have to vehemently disagree with this opinion.
Doctor Zhivago is set during the Russian Revolution, a time when Socialism was rising and personal freedoms were diminishing. This alone would be a fairly interesting topic, if it was done well, but this was a sweeping epic of a love story instead. Zhivago (Omar Sharif) takes a wife, Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin) and they have a child. During these formative years of their marriage, however, Zhivago meets Lara (Julie Christie) who enchants him. After `resisting the attraction' for a while, they meet up a couple of years later when Tonya is pregnant again, and pretty much fall into bed within five minutes of reuniting. Their affair is so obvious that when Tonya is looking for Zhivago at one point, the members of the village where Lara lives all point her to his mistress' house. Charming, yes.
I could have merely disliked the film because of the horrid `romanticism' if the rest of the film had any merit, but everything else is just as bad. I have now seen three David Lean films, and have really enjoyed two of them: `Bridge on the River Kwai' and `Lawrence of Arabia'. For this reason, I was just stunned at how horrible this film is. The scene changes in `Zhivago' are positively laughable  many scenes are about thirty seconds long, and end abruptly, prompting me to internally (and eventually externally when it became apparent that we were all exasperated with this film) say, `That was a great scene' in the most dry manner possible. It got to the point where we were expecting someone to walk in the door and say, `Hello', and promptly have a quick fade out. There are too many things to support the ridiculousness of this film, but one more notable moment was a scene in which Sir Alec Guinness, who was sporadically narrating the film, was talking about a moment when he was speaking to one of the characters. He was narrating the scene, and we are watching the action on the screen, with the narrator in the scene. It ended up looking absolutely absurd and seriously laugh-inducing.
Why Lean couldn't have just, oh, say done the scene without narration? I will never know because there is no way, after writing this review I even want to mention this film ever again, so I am certainly not going to read about it. I've passed the stage of morbid curiosity and have gone right to the denial stage. I want to deny this terrible movie ever passed over my retinas. I even indignantly confronted some family members at a recent family gathering who actually really liked this film and demanded they tell me why this is a good film, and the first thing every one of them said was that it was `romantic'. Unfortunately, I was almost thrown out on my ear when I said, `Romantic? Romantic?! It's SLEAZY!!!' Before anyone accuses me of fanatical piety, let me remind any gentle readers that my favorite film of 2003 was Kill Bill Vol. 1 and I laughed until I cried at the `bang-up' ending of `Intolerable Cruelty', so the moral police I certainly am not. Dr. Zhivago was just ridiculously bad melodrama disguised as an epic because of its dramatic backdrop. I expected a lot and received worse than nothing; a loathsome story and really bad filmmaking.
--Shelly