Maddeningly literal-minded...

Rating: 6/10 (3 October 2009)

Screenwriter Robert Bolt and director David Lean approach this mammoth adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel as if they were actually portraying a chapter of Russian history. It's really just a star-crossed lovers' tale, with all the crimes and slaughters and entangled relationships each falling by the wayside in their own time. Discouraged against trying to make a living at writing poetry, Omar Sharif's Yuri Zhivago turns to medicine during the Russian Revolution, meeting Julie Christie's volunteer-nurse Lara just before Lenin rises to power and the Revolt turns into a civil war. Both Yuri and Lara are married to other people; this coupled with her stormy romantic past (having shot her married lover at a party attended by Zhivago four years prior) initially keeps Lara out of Yuri's arms (but not for long!). There are individual scenes and performances which work, but the film doesn't hang together as a whole--and, as a result, it feels padded and overlong, stiff and occasionally self-conscious. The prologue featuring Alec Guinness as Yuri's half-brother (a former policeman turned General) is laughably wooden, and plays like a parody of the material; worse, Guinness sometimes intrudes upon what we're seeing with voice-over recollections that come out of nowhere, overlapping the main dialogue! The picture has visual beauty, but it has no heart. There's nothing underneath the pretty images to move us (except that schlocky, Oscar-winning music by Maurice Jarre). Yuri has an almost-iconic longing for Lara which makes the central theme timeless and powerful to a lot of people, yet Sharif's performance isn't very good. The best acting is done by Rod Steiger as the tempestuous, lusty legal representative Komarovsky; the worst is given by Klaus Kinski as a half-mad Comrade. **1/2 from ****