Dr. Zhivago

I finished watching Dr. Zhivago (1965) yesterday evening.

This film was an ambitious project. Based on the novel by Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), it tells a story spread across the expanses of Russia. Filming, of course, could not be done inside the Soviet Union; Finland and Spain stood in for the USSR. A large set was built to represent early-twentieth-century Moscow, and liberal use was made of steam locomotives and endless frozen landscapes. The result is impressive. Unfortunately, the human elements do not shine as the natural elements do.

One gets the impression that even the camera crew got bored with the acting. At times the camera ignores the humans, showing more interest in the landscape behind them. This is fortunate for the movie. The characters, like the land, fill their roles and dutifully advance the plot. The difference is that no one expects the land to simulate emotional turmoil or hold believable conversations.

That is the harsher way of looking at it. A gentler appraisal would say that the actors were upstaged. The director, David Lean, made the land a character in the story. The humans do their jobs as storytelling elements, but they are not in control. They are subject to forces beyond their power or comprehension -- love, guilt, history, the Party -- that are represented in the physical presence of the Russian terrain. The persons are part of something larger, something impersonal and inexorable.

The other Lean films I have seen have a similarly strong sense of place. The land plays an active part in the proceedings of these movies. In The Bridge on the River Kwai, for example, the steamy jungles lend desperation to everything that takes place; the humans kill themselves for a bridge, but the river is the only victor. In Lawrence of Arabia, triumph over the desert feeds Lawrence's messiah complex, but his dreams collapse when the physical infrastructure of Damascus thwarts his desert-dwelling allies. In A Passage to India, an ocean separates cultures, the distance of a train trip causes disaster, a cave alienates individuals, and remoteness allows reconciliation. In these films, personality is limited by, if not transformed by, the geography.

This second explanation probably represents overanalysis of the cinematography. I think the people making Dr. Zhivago were just a little too conscious of the fact that they were filming an epic. As a result, they slipped out of good novelistic narrative. Even the fact that the movie was presented as an extended flashback hurt them; the storytellers could not shake the idea that this story was already over. Of course, one should never underestimate the power of poor acting, either.

Interestingly, I found Zhivago's wife quite a bit more attractive than his lover. Perhaps I was merely biased in favor of fidelity. Or perhaps I was underwhelmed by the poor acting of the mistress. The faithful Tonya earns a lot of sympathy; she makes a scene beautiful just by looking very pregnant. By contrast, Lara fails to earn sympathy despite all of the abuse and abandonment she endures. I simply could not believe that three different men could be so obsessed with her.

I was also disappointed by the lack of poetry in the film. I mean that quite literally. Yuri Zhivago (like Pasternak) is a renowned poet frowned upon by the Party, but we in the audience never get to see what all the fuss is about. The closest thing we get is a scene in which Zhivago, hiding in a snowbound cabin, suddenly starts writing a cyle of poems in Lara's honor. We see not one word of what he writes. This was a significant cinematic misstep, in my opinion. Zhivago is a character of great reserve, and most of his emotion comes no further than his eyes. Without his writing, we cannot grasp his thoughts.

In the end, the cinematography makes the film worth seeing.

We last see Lara at a slight distance, as she quietly walks away from us along a city wall. On the wall is a huge poster of Stalin's smiling face. Lara vanishes beyond the right edge of the screen. The camera remains perfectly still. We see the wall. We see Stalin. We no longer see Lara.

The film ends with a view of a huge dam project. We see an overhead view of the open floodgates. We watch a foaming torrent of water spill out and sweep downward. The credits begin rolling along with the water, as if the names of the film's participants are being swept along by the flood. Finally, we see a rainbow floating in the mist downstream.