Doctor Zhivago and Master Lean... two misunderstood poets...

Rating: 9/10 (4 October 2018)

There's a scene where Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) examines some organisms from his microscope, the doctor is interested but the poet is in awe of their beauty. That detail mirrors David Lean's own method: he's a man of art who cares less for interest than emotion. Like when a window behind Lara (Julie Christie) exposes a radiant sun. It is less the sun that is the "small touch" than the way Yuri thinks of Lara whenever he sees sun, flowers or sunflowers.
How else can you tell a poet apart from his capability to find in anything -from a window covered with frost to majestic trees near the Urals- the path to heavenly imagery? If anything, the film is about the poet Zhivago and these are as powerful leitmotifs as the iconic "Lara's theme" by Maurice Jarre, reminding us that nothing can ever prevent the noblest sentiments to bloom, not a cold winter, not even a revolution or a civil war. While "Doctor Zhivago" has the pretension of an epic, it's as much about war as "Casablanca", and as romantic, glossy and old-fashioned.
And should it be a surprise from the director of "Brief Encounter"? I saw in "Doctor Zhivago", the same eagerness to get to the passion but with a special sense of crafted patience. Contrarily to "Brief Encounter", Lean had the luxury of three hours of running time so he could toy with our expectations by making both Yuri and Lara meet in several occasions to plant the seeds of a romance that wouldn't blow until the two first hours are over. As if there was more power in the anticipation of love than love itself.
And strangely enough, for all the talk about the director's talent when it comes to big production and crowded scenes, it's during the intimate moments that the film glows, not only between Yuri and Lara but even in the earlier scenes that set up key characters such as the corrupt aristocratic and pragmatic Kamarovsky (played by the only American cast-member Rod Steiger) or the solemn idealism of Tom Courtenay as Pacha. The former would survive out of a romanticism he never suspected, the latter would lose his heart for the Revolution.
In fact, all characters are more or less tragic figures and the movie is like a great canvas where people are forced to make a choice between feelings and duty, sometimes making both converge like Tonya, Yuri's devoted wife (Geraldine Chaplin) but overall, they are all guided by feelings that can't be more individualistic, if not selfish. That might be the antithesis to the spirit of the Revolution that made Boris Pastarnek's novel silenced by official decree. The poet who loved two women and wrote the novel in ten years was forced to decline his Nobel Prize because he loved Russia even more and couldn't accept exile.

Yet he was the poet, and the intolerance that struck his life is still less intolerable than admitting that the Revolution totally canceled passion in the hearts of Russians, as Zhivago's brother (Alec Guinness) stated "there's no Russian who doesn't love poetry". And Yuri finds something in Lara that ignites his poet's soul, something that transcends whatever reality and marital comfort can provide. Hard to judge him, the way Julie Christie looks in the film that doesn't even give half its full meaning to the word beauty: her hair, her lips, her eyes... Yuri's words were certainly far more eloquent than mine... all I could say is that she was breathtakingly beautiful.
And breathtaking is a word that applies to Lean's attention to visual details, and the way each of his movies are opportunities for spectacular landscape shots. His imagery allowed then-viewers to escape from their monotony and explore the wilderness, whether in the desert, the Indochinese jungle or the cold Siberian winter where an ice palace becomes the setting of a magnificent romance. And even in the ugliness of a train where people are piled up like cattle for days, Lean proves how great a director he is by precisely not directing Klaus Kinski, letting him be truly the free man he's portraying in the film.
Lean's work is so admirable in subtle details that it was obviously diluted into the vastness of the project, earning him severe critics, blaming him for trivializing History. Time did justice to the movie and allowed it to be remembered as one of the last great super-production of its era, one that allowed Omar Sharif, an Arab riding a camel, to become a romantic leading man, playing against part, but what part! Like a poet, he's a rather passive observer, but for all the cast-members I mentioned -including Ralph Richardson as the scene-stealing father-in-lax rumbling about the hooligans who took over power- It is definitely Sharif's film.
I closed my review of "Lawrence of Arabia" by a small ethnic bias saying that I was delighted that one of the best British American films would be about Arabs and now, that one of the highest-grossing movies of all-time, and most prestigious British films, would star an Arab was equally delightful. And I will also conclude by inviting you to look on Youtube the words' Zhivago and Didi, this was a sketch I grew up with that made me aware of that score two decades before I saw the film, I can never hear that theme without thinking of it, sometimes, you find connections in the weirdest places. It's not much poetry, but maybe the other main feeling Lara's theme conveys: nostalgia, the best antidote against cynicism or any excesses of rationality.
Sure there are a few things to "criticize" but I don't think the film intended its audience to venture into intellectual territories... so just let yourself be transported by the story the actors and the old-school Hollywood charm of "Doctor Zhivago", and its so effective music and you won't be disappointed.