Doctor Zhivago [Special Edition]

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Whoopi Goldberg once remarked something to the effect that if movies weren´t big, they´d be TV. Well, director David Lean made big movies. I mean BIG movies. His productions weren´t always so, but they got bigger as they went along. Of course, his most famous British films of the forties were modest affairs: "Blithe Spirit" (1945), "Brief Encounter" (1945), "Great Expectations" (1946), and "Oliver Twist" (1948). Later came the blockbusters: "The Bridge on the River Kwai" (1957), "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962), "Doctor Zhivago" (1965), "Ryan´s Daughter" (1970), and "A Passage to India" (1984). When you watch a David Lean film, you not only find epic action, adventure, or romance, you find epic scope. And, above all, you find beauty. Ravishing, breathtaking beauty.

In this latter regard, "Doctor Zhivago" may be the loftiest of all his creations, and it´s a pleasure to say that Warner Brothers have not slighted it in their deluxe, two-disc, special-edition DVD set.

More than anything else, "Zhivago" is a love story. In fact, as a critic of the day once commented, it may be the biggest, grandest soap opera ever produced, a criticism that at the time distressed the director no end. But it is soap with the exalted breadth of a "Gone With the Wind." Like its earlier colleague, it tells an intimate story of love and conflict set against the backdrop of a country in war. The characters in conflict are a young, kind, sensitive doctor and poet, Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif); Yuri´s fiancee and future wife, Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin); Yuri´s second love, with whom he is torn, Lara (Julie Christie); Lara´s fiancee and future husband, Pasha (Tom Courtenay); and Lara´s rich and powerful lover, Komarovsky (Rod Steiger).

The clashes outside their personal lives are World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the Russian Civil War, and Lean does a skillful job continuously juxtaposing these world-shattering events with the internal strife of his protagonists. A typical example is a series of shots crosscut early on in the story where we see a troop of Russian soldiers massacring a crowd of civilian protesters, while at the same time we watch the lecherous Komarovsky violating the seventeen-year-old Lara. The sequence ends with a shot of bloodstained snow after the mass killings, emblematic of the plight of the Russian people and of Lara herself. The story is told in flashback many years later by Yuri´s half brother, Yevgraf (Alec Guinness), now a Communist Russian General, as he searches for his brother´s long-lost daughter.

Based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Boris Pasternak, "Zhivago" is a passionate movie about passionate people in passionate times. Nothing is ever simple here as the shifting loyalties in national affairs are analogized with the shifting loyalties of the story´s human relationships. When the Communists take over the country, they view the doctor and his poems as "petty bourgeois and self-indulgent," and here lies the heart of the matter. Political turmoil combines with private turmoil as the government attempts to force everyone into the same state of "equality." Even love, says the state, must take a back seat to the greater public good. But people are people, individuals, not clones or machines, and they cannot be boxed into mandatory conditions of consistency (as the failed experiment in Communism finally proved some seven decades later). The emotions of the story´s characters cannot be confined, their passions cannot be restricted, and thus we witness smoldering and ultimately consuming fires within fires.

Omar Sharif says on the commentary track that Zhivago is the part for which he is best known today, more so even than for his remarkable role in "Lawrence of Arabia." One can see why. His Zhivago is delicate, heroic, benevolent, confused, and troubled. His fervent love for two women drives him to desperation, and the young Sharif well exudes his character´s naive and bewildered discomfort. Julie Christie´s fragile-appearing Lara is, nonetheless, strong and resilient; and Ms. Christie is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful people ever to grace a screen.

Steiger´s Komarovsky is an inveterate womanizer, yet he, too, proves almost noble in time. Chaplin´s Tonya is the very model of a dutiful wife and more; she is caring, loving, and understanding, to be sure, yet surprisingly self-reliant as well. All the same, Courtenay´s role is perhaps the most intriguing of all, as he must undergo the severest personality transformation. His metamorphosis is astonishing, for which he deservedly earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Old pros Alec Guinness as Yuri´s elder brother and Ralph Richardson as Tanya´s father perform as ably as we would expect them to and further complement the fine cast.

I don´t suppose the film would be half so well remembered, though, if it weren´t for Maurice Jarre´s musical score and Freddie Young´s cinematography. Jarre´s music may, indeed, be as famous as the film itself. Play a moment of "Lara´s Theme" for anyone at a party and there will be instant recognition. It´s the kind of expansive, visionary music that every filmmaker dreams of putting into his work. What´s more, while it´s music at once massive and imposing, it can be sweet and tender as well, particularly when played on the traditional Russian balalaika. The music may become tiresome through repetition, but that makes it only a little less effective.

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