A wonderful movie that misses a central point of the book

Rating: Null/10 (31 January 2001)

David Lean's 1965 film is definitely worth seeing. It's a visual tapestry that's stunning from beginning to end, and one of those wide screen epics of the 1950s and '60s that attempted to pull viewers away from the banalities of television.
However, the film misses a central point of Pasternak's novel and could hardly do otherwise if it intended to communicate to English-speaking audiences. In the author's narrative, which takes place during the Great War, the Revolutions of 1917 and the ensuing Civil War, he takes great pains to focus on a particular family and its trials, bringing in the specifics of external history only when absolutely necessary. The reader is never told in so many words that, for example, the February Revolution has taken place and that the Tsar has abdicated. Nor is the reader told that Lenin has seized power and that civil war has broken out between the Whites and the Reds. We are told that, say, Kolchak's army is nearby, and that it's had such and such an effect on the novel's main characters.
Pasternak was evidently attempting to de-emphasize the grand historical forces that are so central to the Marxist worldview, focussing instead on the personal at the expense of the political. This is one of the things that likely got him in trouble with Soviet authorities. However, no filmmaker could possibly have taken this approach and hoped to make sense to those unacquainted with Russian history--which, after all, includes most of its intended audience. Thus a brilliant film will always remain but a shadow of the original novel.