Highly overrated

Rating: 3/10 (18 June 2009)

Imho, this is the most overrated movie of all time. True, the music is unforgettable and so are many scenes (cavalry charges, trains, fairy tale ice palaces) in themselves. Unfortunately, this isn't enough to make a movie great. There are characters to be played, psychologies to be developed, tension to be sustained. In Zhivago, all this is equally bad. There are movies (good movies) in which all the actors, including the lesser ones, outdo themselves. And there are movies (bad movies) in which even the good actors perform poorly. Zhivago is one of the latter. Alec Guiness and Rod Steiger are far below their usual level, and Omar Sharif, Julie Christie and Geraldine Chaplin are their usual selves, i.e. very poor actors with the expressive powers of Roger Moore, say. And literally everyone could play Pasha the way Tom Courtenay did. Julie Christie as an innocent seventeen year old schoolgirl is simply pathetic and her make-up is terrible! A love story against a background of war, in which characters go through ordeal and are changed accordingly, has made for some of the best literature in history. Not so in this movie. A seventeen year old beauty getting involved with her mother's cynical lover, for instance, is an interesting fact that a good movie maker could turn into a fascinating event. Here we are simply left with the superficial facts, without anything explaining why all this happens in the first place and why things remain the way they are. And apart from her ironing, nothing whatsoever explains why Zhivago falls for his nurse to the point of cheating his wife. In short, as Zhivago and Lara bump into each other time and again (coincidence being the main plot engine) nothing whatsoever is explained. Neither passion nor love is made the least believable. Lara, pregnant and well, leaves Zhivago most resignedly behind, and Zhivago's wife and child are kind enough to simply vanish from the plot. As for the story, it is narrated in such a complicated manner that one simply looses track.
There are also many technical flaws. Many scenes are set in an icy cold, yet nowhere do breaths make vapour. And Pasha seems to have indestructible glasses, surviving sabre cuts and shell explosions with equal ease.
From the DVD extra's, I learnt that critics were bad when the movie was released. I agree with them.