50 Years of Anticipation Down the Drain

Rating: 7/10 (28 December 2015)

I rarely comment negatively on films, preferring to spend my time raving about things I like. I am the most inveterate of film watchers, and I estimate I've seen some 20 to 25 thousand in my life. Yet, for whatever reason, I never saw this extraordinarily famous film until yesterday, a full 50 years after its release. Why did I not see it? Maybe I suspected something was wrong, maybe it's that I was in the army when it first came out, maybe I just don't know. But now I know, and very sadly, that I didn't miss all that much.
The film is pictorially gorgeous throughout, the mark of David Lean's post mid-1950s directing career, but that almost ends the positive commentary. I found the film almost totally cold, most of the characters unsympathetic (and not always the ones you might think), the performances mostly of little depth if not totally wooden, and I had extreme difficulty following not just the changing feelings of the lead characters, but even the story line as the War and then the Revolution progress. Why Mr. Bolt won an Oscar for his screenplay adaptation of the book is a total mystery to me. We would be in the middle of one scene, under a specific set of historical circumstances, only to suddenly find ourselves in the middle of another scene, under very different historical circumstances, and with little to no explanation covering the change. If I got lost once, I got lost 6 or 8 times in the course of the movie. I simply do not understand most of the characters in this film. Lara does not seem to me to be all that mesmerizing to the point where the Courtenay, Steiger and Sharif characters are so besotted with her. Why she should be any more a muse for Zhivago's poetry than is his wife, or the Revolution itself, is not at all clear to me. Why after 20 or 25 years the Alec Guinness character is suddenly so intent on reestablishing a relationship with someone who might be the daughter of his late half-brother is unclear. I could go on, but the screenplay is a hodgepodge and what makes it worse it that the two leading actors don't really come through all that compellingly. Most at fault is Sharif, who is a fairly shallow actor (especially for an iconic role like this one, which really needs a Brando to do it justice), and who seems to lack any real emotional impact in both his visual appearance and in his spoken lines (his best performance for me remains his cat-who-ate-the-canary interpretation of a Nazi officer investigating a civilian murder in the otherwise not-too-great "Night of the Generals"). One almost expects subtitles like "Now, Dr. Zhivago is sad", "Now, Dr. Zhivago is contemplative", or maybe even "Now, Dr.Zhivago is cold!" Christie is not all that much better here, because I miss the all-entrancing beauty and internal qualities that this character should have as Zhivago's muse. For me, the best performances in the film come from Tom Courtenay as Lara's increasingly heartless Bolshevik husband, Rod Steiger's near-reprehensible-but-always-understandable seducer of Lara, Geraldine Chaplin's lovely and sympathetic portrayal of Zhivago's wife (looks aside, why he would want to tryst with Christie while Chaplin is at home is never very convincingly explained; is he as shallow as the actor portraying him?), and Guinness's somewhat sympathetic-under-the-surface half-brother. Unfortunately, Courtenay disappears fitfully, and then completely upon committing suicide (off screen, yet!), Chaplin disappears about 2/3rds of the way through the film (off screen again!), and Guinness is more of an investigator into the past than a participant in it. Only Steiger has a completely meaty role throughout, and it is one of the best things he ever did. But we are still stuck with Sharif and Christie for three hours. Oh yes, and Maurice Jarre's music has only one real selling point, and that is "Lara's Theme", which is quite beautiful, but it is used so often in the film in various dramatic guises - it seems to fit any situation - that it comes off like the Russian Revolution's musical answer to Dimitri Tiomkin's similar overuse of the title song every few minutes in that much more perfect movie, "High Noon".
Anyway, the film is too visually beautiful to just dismiss, so I must give it a 7, but without the scenery it would be a 5 (although without Sharif, it might have made it to 8!). A sore disappointment after a wait of 50 years to see it!