I’ve always wanted to hijack a hospital intercom, press the little button and go, “Paging Dr. Zhivago, paging Dr. Zhivago.” Just to see if anyone notices.
*****
Some movies are like a snack that tides you over – a can of Pringles, a box of Triscuits, a bag of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish.
Doctor Zhivago is like a five-course meal: steak tartare, garlic mashed potatoes, lemon-sprinkled couscous, Manhattan clam chowder, bread rolls fresh out of the oven … the feast stretches off to the horizon.
Doctor Zhivago is like six movies for the price of one. I can eat the Zhivago leftovers from my fridge for the entire month. Its various other merits aside, the following discussion may essentially boil down to this:
With Doctor Zhivago, I feel like I simply get more bang for my buck.
*****
One night in high school, attempting to procrastinate while doing my homework, I came across the last twenty minutes of Doctor Zhivago and, unbeknownst to me, this was the beginning of a long, tempestuous love affair.
Picture your humble part-time Buddhist author, sixteen years of age, his Advanced Placement U.S. history textbook staring him tauntingly in the face, flipping through the television channels, where, upon reaching American Movie Classics, he comes across a letterboxed broadcast of a film which, based on the look and feel of it, he pegs as having been released sometime in the 1960s.
My father, cooking dinner for himself in the tiny kitchen behind me, from which one can also view our tiny television, proclaims, “Oh, interesting, Doctor Zhivago.”
“Huh?”
“Oh man. It’s a David Lean movie. His thing was that his movies all had incredible cinematography, I mean, just take a look at it.”
Indeed, as he utters these very words, I am most likely soaking in the image of the glistening interior of the Varykino ice palace. An episode of E.R., this clearly is not.
“So it’s a pretty good movie?”
“Well … I don’t know if it’s his best movie, I mean, the plot kind of meanders and it doesn’t make any sense, but it’s kind of worth it just for the cinematography. And for Julie Christie. Talk about a babe.”
Fascinated as I am by my father’s opinions on the aesthetic merits of various ‘60s actresses, I am more fascinated by the house made out of, like, crystal chandeliers, or whatever the fuck that is. I presume I have caught the film, if not toward the ending, then at least in the middle? Probably should switch channels, to be honest. Here I am, with zero idea as to who is doing what, or why they are doing it, but if I’m trying to do my homework, this movie clearly is not helping; the thing just sucks me in:
- Sad-eyed, mustachioed man in a fur coat races up the frost-smothered stairwell of a frozen mansion, apparently desperate to catch one last glimpse of this woman who is departing him (if I have to venture a guess … forever?). Obviously seems pretty worked up about it. Starts clawing at the window, scratching at the window, smashing the window with a metal pipe, while hummable, vaguely Slavic music swells on the soundtrack.
- A couple of scenes later. Same sad-eyed, mustachioed man, now with noticeably grayer hair, is sitting in a crowded railcar, before spotting presumably that very same woman last seen at the Hidden Fortress house, walking along the sidewalk (years after the fact, it seems?), which causes him to break out into a cold sweat, yank on the collar of his shirt, stumble out of the railcar, and keel over right in the middle of the street!
- Next thing I know, I’m being hit with these panoramic shots of huge plumes of water gushing out of a giant concrete dam as the credits roll. The words flash on the screen with a grand, and yet understated, confidence: “Directed by David Lean.”
I quickly make a mental note to myself: “Should probably watch this whole movie from beginning to end sometime.”
And so, like Yuri Andreivich the first moment he laid eyes on Larissa Antipova, I realized I was fated to fall madly, desperately in love with Doctor Zhivago. But also like Yuri, I wondered, for many years, if I’d fallen harder in love with my object of affection than was socially appropriate for me to do so.
See, as I began to consult the various film guides at my disposal, I became aware of a very clear consensus regarding this feature-length motion picture centered around this supposed medical professional named Zhivago that made me wonder if I should place it closer to the back of my “movies to watch” list than the front: while it was a “very good movie,” it was officially, certifiably not a “great movie.” From Rating the Movies, which awarded the film three-and-a-half stars (out of four):
“Alarmingly long, exquisitely produced historical epic was one of the most popular films of the ‘60s, thanks to visual sweep and plenty of soap-opera sentiment. Powerful individual segments work better than the whole, but it’s nevertheless absorbing and entertaining.”
From Video Movie Guide, which awarded the film four stars (out of five):
“The screenplay is choppy and overlong and is often sacrificed to the spectacle of vast panoramas, detailed sets, and impressive costumes. These artistic elements, along with a beautiful musical score, make for cinema on a grand scale, and it remains a most watchable movie.”
“Alarmingly long” and yet “absorbing” and “entertaining”? “Overlong” and yet “most watchable”? Okaaaaay. So were they recommending it to me or not?
All right, I’m sure my man Ebert could help clear up the situation. And yet, as I read the review he’d published upon the film’s 1995 re-release, in which he only awarded it three stars out of four, I felt the frosty winds of confusion envelope me even further:
When David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago was released in 1965, it was pounced upon by the critics, who found it a picture-postcard view of revolution, a love story balanced uneasily atop a painstaking reconstruction of Russia. Lean was known for his elaborate sets, his infinite patience with nature and climates, and his meticulous art direction, but for Pauline Kael, his “method is basically primitive, admired by the same sort of people who are delighted when a stage set has running water or a painted horse looks real enough to ride.” Sometimes one must admit one is precisely that sort of person. I agree that the plot of Doctor Zhivago lumbers noisily from nowhere to nowhere. That the characters undergo inexplicable changes of heart and personality. That it is not easy to care much about Zhivago himself, in Omar Sharif’s soulful but bewildered performance. That the life of the movie is in its corners (the wickedness of Rod Steiger’s voluptuary, the solemn pomposity of Tom Courtenay’s revolutionary). That “Lara’s Theme,” by Maurice Jarre, goes on the same shelf as “Waltzing Matilda” as tunes that threaten to drive me mad … Watching the film again, I found it hard to believe that the Chaplin character could be so understanding. Later, when Komarovsky offers Lara an opportunity to save the life of herself and her child, call me a realist, but I thought she should have taken it. And the final pathetic scene, with Zhivago staggering after the woman on the Moscow street, is unforgivable. So, yes, it’s soppy and manipulative and mushy. But that train looks real enough to ride.
Three stars? Three stars? Wasn’t that the same rating I’d just seen him give The Fully Monty and There’s Something About Mary? Look, I may have only viewed the last twenty minutes, but it sure as shit didn’t feel like the last twenty minutes of a “three star” movie. Even Ebert’s lukewarm review still piqued my curiosity. I only had one problem: finding a letterboxed copy.
The younger generations are not always to be envied, but if you are someone who is wholly unfamiliar with the term “pan-and-scan,” well … allow me this quick tutorial. In the widescreen version, a continuous, uninterrupted, and perfectly composed 10-second shot of Lara and Komarovsky conversing in a room together …
… would, in the pan-and-scan version, be a three-second shot of Lara talking…
… a two-second shot of Komarovsky talking …
… then maybe another three-second shot of Lara talking …
… and then maybe one of these for good measure.
So, after a prolonged attempt to track down a widescreen copy without success, I considered whether I would be better off waiting months, possibly years, like Yuri being held hostage in the Red Army against his will, until I could watch such a version, or simply watching a pan-and-scan version and getting it out of the way.
That pan-and-scan VHS copy resting on the video shelf at my local library, staring me in the face every time I strolled past, was certainly complicating the issue. Checking it out would have cost me less than what it would have cost a Russian peasant to purchase a sack of flour, but … but …
And I was still on the fence when a local gentleman, who appeared to be in his fifties, saw me picking up the bulky, double-cassette box off the shelf, and said to me, entirely unprompted, “Oh man, Doctor ZHIVAGO.”
“Yeah, I’ve never seen it.”
“You’ve never seen Doctor ZHIVAGO?” It was as if I said I’d never seen the ocean.
“No. Guess I should see it, huh?”
“Should you see Doctor ZHIVAGO?” He had this look in his eye, like he was recalling the birth of his firstborn child. Apparently the news that the film was officially considered “flawed” and “overlong” had never reached his doorstep. “I feel bad for anyone who hasn’t seen Doctor Zhivago.”
All right, that settled it then.
Did I make the right call? Did the Russian Revolution turn out to be a better outcome for the Russian people than no revolution at all? Should NBC have given The Tonight Show to Letterman instead of Leno?
Did watching Doctor Zhivago on pan-and-scan VHS even count as watching Doctor Zhivago? Wasn’t that sort of like listening to Dark Side of the Moon through a single AM radio speaker, or reading an abridged version of Hamlet?
Nevertheless, upon viewing the film in this compromised format, I concluded that I enjoyed it very much, that there was very little about it that struck me as outright substandard, that the stranger from the library’s enthusiasm was not necessarily misplaced, and that it was probably the third-best David Lean film, which I knew having seen a grand total of … three David Lean films.
See, when I began getting the lay of the David Lean “land,” here is what the overwhelming consensus seemed to be: The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia were his two “Best Picture-winning masterpieces,” while Doctor Zhivago was his “highly enjoyable yet flawed Best Picture nominee.” And, like an obedient apparatchik, I subscribed to this hierarchy without questioning it.
However. About three years after that initial viewing, while watching a random television program which featured a couple of quick (and letterboxed) clips of Doctor Zhivago, an unmistakable “Damn, I think I need to see that again” instinct hit me in the gut – an aura of unfinished business. Lo and behold, during my next trip to the local video store, I found my holy grail – a widescreen VHS copy. Now, I was quite strict in those days about saving my film rental money for movies I hadn’t already seen, but, like Lara’s face superimposed against a field of dandelions, Doctor Zhivago was beckoning to me once more.
And as I viewed Doctor Zhivago while literally taking in about 40% of the film for the very first time, I began to come to my own, less orthodox (Russian Orthodox?) conclusion. Between Bridge and Zhivago, I was starting to consider Zhivago to be the film that had more in common with Lawrence in terms of visual attitude, vastness of scale, narrative complexity, and overall artistic merit, rather than Bridge. How come I didn’t feel the same great, burning desire to rewatch Bridge on the River Kwai?
This was a thrill I had never known before: the thrill of disagreeing with the consensus.
Later on, just to be certain of my outlier of a take, I did give Bridge on the River Kwai a fresh viewing and … let me put it this way. I tend to think of some movies as “novels” and some movies as more like “short stories stretched out to feature film length.” To me, Bridge falls in the latter category. Yeah, all right, I get it, the movie has one big, ironic little message: Colonel Nicholson becomes so monomaniacally obsessed with demonstrating the superior engineering capabilities of the British army that he doesn’t realize that, in doing so, he’s aiding the enemy. Whoa. Dude. I mean, after seeing the film once, I got the point. On repeat viewing, I didn’t seem to come across any additional point to get.
Not to mention the number of artistic compromises in Bridge that I think Lean found the clout (or courage?) to avoid in subsequent projects, such as shoehorning a studly American character played by a studly American actor (William Holden, soon to bare far less of his chest in my 10th favorite movie of the ‘60s) into a storyline that had little need for it, presumably to give the movie more U.S. box office draw. Ditto the arguably superfluous love scenes with scantily-clad females (Lean sure didn’t worry about shoehorning any of that into Lawrence of Arabia).
Like, I can see how Bridge would have been the kind of film that really “blew the minds” of adolescent males weaned on more conventional, good guy/bad guy late ‘50s big-budget Hollywood action films, with its “dramatic irony” and “moral ambiguity” and all that sexy crap, but I don’t think Lean had truly hit his stride within this new “I make epics!” phase of his career. Hell, throughout Bridge, he was still tethered to the dissolve, not yet having discovered the frisson of the jump cut. And the whole movie essentially takes place in one location (!). Unlike Zhivago, it’s neat, clean, and tidy; I guess that’s why reviewers have found less to harp on.
But I could swim around inside Zhivago for days and still not hit the bottom. There’s just more biscuit for me to chew on.
*****
Quick: name the greatest film ever made that features, as its protagonist, a poet. What’s that? You can’t name any other movie that features, as its protagonist, a poet? That is the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard.
How do you make a movie about a poet? Do you show the poet leaning on a stool in a coffee house reading his riveting verse out loud to a room full of wide-eyed admirers? Have a narrator read poems in voiceover? Flash the pages of a poetry book onto the screen in psychedelic colors?
In a three-hour-and-twenty-minute film that is supposedly about a poet, I don’t believe a single character in Doctor Zhivago utters one line of poetry. You know why? Because David Lean wasn’t an English major, he was a fucking filmmaker.
Where others would have wilted, Lean scoffed. As Omar Sharif explains in the making-of documentary:
When I arrived to meet David Lean, he said, “I’m going to ask you to do something extremely difficult for an actor to do. I want you to do nothing at all. Not to emote, not to have any reaction, not to do anything at all.” And I said, “Why is that?” And he said, “Because when we were writing the script, with Robert [Bolt], our problem was how to show, in a film, that a man is a poet. We can’t have him reciting poetry to say this man is a poet. So we decided that the whole film would be seen through his eyes. You will be in every scene, practically, but it will always be the other person’s scene, the other actor’s scene, and you have to be patient, you have to do nothing.”
In other words, Lean decided that if anyone was going to be the poet around here, it was going to be him.
Had I been asked, after my first letterboxed viewing of it, to defend Doctor Zhivago to the naysayers, I might not have mentioned the screenplay, the acting, the period detail, or even the art direction and costume design. Rather, I would have defended Zhivago based on one quality, and one quality alone:
Its visual style.
I could watch Doctor Zhivago with the sound off, no subtitles on, with ear plugs, with a couple in the next room having a divorce-worthy verbal altercation, with sixteen Boeing 747s roaring in the background, and I would still put it somewhere in my Top 10.
If you’re a cinematographer who wants to top Doctor Zhivago, I mean, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m sorry. I really am. You’re screwed. Hang it up and study coding instead.
Lean brought the poetry all right – the visual poetry. This movie is like Wordsworth on acid. At the risk of watching my essay devolve into screen shots of every single frame of Doctor Zhivago, I might as well throw in a few good ones. Honestly, I could probably stick to shots of trains and call it a day:
Lean. Trains. Mic drop.
All right, there’s also those sexy, harsh, barren, snowy wasteland shots:
But wait – he can do interiors!
And at this point, every other movie that’s ever been made is screaming out to me, “OK! OK! Enough! Please! Stop! You’re making us look bad.”
But when I say “visual poetry,” I’m not merely referring to the cinematography alone (though kudos to Freddie Young, who had also worked with Lean on Lawrence). On the DVD commentary track, Sandra Lean, the director’s widow, quotes an excerpt from a note that screenwriter Robert Bolt had written in his personal copy of Boris Pasternak’s novel (haven’t had the chance to read it yet, but I’m sure I’ll get around to it someday), which he had intended to pass on to Lean:
“The essence of the book is in the style – a style of leisure. Contrary to most books and almost all films, the style – detail, observations, insight – is the essence. The story is accidental. It is a poem. The film, too, must be a poem.”
Hence explaining how I could stumble upon the last twenty minutes on TV and still enjoy myself. Although I sardonically roll my eyes at Ebert’s statement that the film’s plot “lumbers noisily from nowhere to nowhere,” in a sense, maybe he’s half right, because to me, the story of Doctor Zhivago plays second fiddle to the style. It’s not so much about what “happens” in Doctor Zhivago, but more about how the scenes “feel.”
Are there elements of Doctor Zhivago’s storyline that are overly sentimental and unnecessarily convoluted? Sure, yeah, maybe, not really, who gives a damn? Sometimes a film is simply pleasurable to watch. And after my second viewing of it, that’s how I would have defended it to its detractors.
Until my third viewing, when I decided that all that crap that critics complained wasn’t in Doctor Zhivago … was maybe in there after all? Intelligent screenplay? Sharp dialogue? Complex characterizations? Thought-provoking analysis of Soviet history and culture? What was I missing? If Lean’s filmmaking style was so “primitive,” then why did I keep finding new details to appreciate every time I viewed it? In other words, if Doctor Zhivago was “flawed,” then could more movies be “flawed” like this one, please?
Let’s call Doctor Zhivago the Stevie Wonder of movies: his singing is so warm and inviting that the casual fan doesn’t even notice how killer all the drumming, harmonica playing, keyboard playing, songwriting, and production are until the 28th listen. That’s what gets me. Zhivago only needed its visual splendor to put itself over the top, but, uh-oh, it’s got all these other things going for it too? Doctor Zhivago is like the baseball slugger who was only famous in his heyday for hitting home runs, but in hindsight, once the sabermetric geeks took a closer look at the stats, they realized that, huh, he hit singles, drew walks, ran the bases well, and even played above-average defense. Doctor Zhivago is a five-tool player.
And this may sound like a strange observation to make about a film that is three hours and twenty minutes long, but so many of the scenes in Doctor Zhivago strike me as … compact.
*****
Some directors love dialogue. Some directors love special effects. David Lean loved editing.
David Lean loved editing the way that Nikita Khruschev loved corn. David Lean loved editing so much, in fact, that, according to Omar Sharif in the DVD commentary, a couple of weeks after Zhivago had already premiered, he went back and edited it some more:
David barely had time to edit it. We re-finished the shooting of Doctor Zhivago on the 16th of October, 1965, and the film had to come out on the 21st or 22nd of December to qualify for the Oscars, and not one foot of film had been edited when we finished shooting because David wouldn’t let anyone do it … So no one saw it, except on opening night in New York, and it was a disaster. The public hated it, the critics were terrible, and I remember after the opening night we all went and had some supper at 21, David smoking with his cigarette holder, and reflecting a very long time … and he sat there and he reflected for a long time, without speaking. And he said, “I know what I did wrong. I cut it all wrong. The editing was completely idiotic.” He went back to the editing room and he re-cut the negative. And he started sending prints, as he was printing them, to the very cinemas where the film was being shown. And the film had done very badly in the first two weeks in all the cinemas, you can check these numbers. And then when the new copies came in, the new prints, with the new re-editing which he had done, it started going up and up and up and it became a HUGE hit, and even the critics, of course we met them later, and David had a thing to tell them or two, but they also said, “Well we didn’t see the same film, when we saw it on opening night it was not the film that’s on today,” and that’s true. I saw it on opening night, it was pretty dismal. The tempo, the rhythm, you know it makes a huge difference. You know David used to say – he was such an expert on editing, I mean that was his great thing – he says, “You know, if you put two frames back on, or you take two frames out of a shot, it made a huge difference.” If you make the music come in two frames later than you did, or two frames earlier, it makes a huge difference.
Oh, go ahead and laugh, but you know he’s right. I say give David Lean as much time to edit as he wants. (Not sure what the role of Norman Savage, the film’s official “editor,” was, but let’s give him a hand as well.) I don’t want some lazy, indifferent, cavalier slacker editing Doctor Zhivago. I want some obsessive, hyper-focused nut with bulging, avian eyes poring over every split second. I want David Lean to edit my blog posts.
The best way I’d put it is that the man knew how to cram an encyclopedia’s worth of information into very brief snippets of screen time. Zhivago might be twice as long as most movies are, but in a way, I feel like it contains even more story than that. Analyzing Doctor Zhivago is like unfolding an animal’s intestines. I wouldn’t call it an epic because it’s “long,” or because it features panoramic shots of snow-covered fields and restless peasant mobs, but because of the way it suggests lives, events, and situations taking place far beyond the borders of the frame.
Lean plays with time like a wizard waving a wand. He’s the kind of storyteller who is so jacked up about the story he wants to tell that he simply cuts right to the good stuff without even bothering to warn me. The poor, helpless characters in his creation are stuck, trapped, rendered impotent by the vagaries of fate, but Lean? He’s Superman. He can take you over here, then bring you over there, and then without even letting you catch your breath, he’ll jump ahead six months because oh, oh, he really wants to show you this part.
You want unexpected cuts? I’ve got your unexpected cuts right here:
13:23: So are Yevgraf (played by Alec Guinness, teaming up with Lean for, I believe, the 87th time) and this peasant girl (played by Rita Tushingham) just going to sit around in a non-descript office for three hours and talk? I’d probably still watch that, but no. After peppering her with an initial volley of narratively useful and plot-foreshadowing questions while trying to ascertain whether or not the girl might be Yuri and Lara’s long-lost love child, Yevgraf sees that more context is needed. As he begins, off-camera, to dive into his half-brother’s backstory, Lean quietly zooms in on the peasant girl’s face: “You see, he lost his mother at about the same age you were when your mother lost you. And in the same part of the world.”
Then BAM! Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in the Comrade General’s office anymore.
You see those little dots there in the lower left corner? Those are people. Well, it plays better on the big screen.
But here’s what I take away from this cut: to the peasant girl, Yevgraf is rambling on about distant history involving a bunch of random nobodies she never met. But by instantaneously cutting so far into the past, I feel like Lean is saying, “Well sure, to the peasant girl, this all took place ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,’ (never pass up a good Alec Guinness/Star Wars joke when you get the chance) but to the people who actually lived through it, this was merely their present, infused with all the drama and uncertainty that the present would entail.”
15:57: You’d think Little Yuri (played by Omar Sharif’s son!) should be feeling morbid, empty, and purposeless while attending his mother’s funeral, but nope, he’s too busy staring up into the azure sky and appreciating the beauty of the leaves swirling off the tree branches and stuff. But the lowering of the coffin lid, followed by the sound of nails being hammered and dirt being shoveled, rains on his parade and brings his attention back to the grave before him.
Meanwhile, Lean’s thinking, “I wonder what it’s like inside that coffin.”
The sound of dirt hitting wood? Halted. Life being lived? Not here. Anyone else feeling a little … claustrophobic?
Sure, it’s just a five-second shot of a woman in a casket, but because of the way it so unexpectedly appears, I feel like it speaks volumes about the gulf between the vibrancy of the living world and the finality of the other side. And when Lean again cuts back to Yuri’s gaze soaking in the ineffable wonder of discarded foliage tumbling through the air as early hints of “Lara’s Theme” gurgle on the soundtrack, it’s like he’s hinting at the refusal of Yuri’s imagination to be smothered by the grim reality of his existence, and the almost foolhardy optimism that Yuri seems destined to carry within him even when it’s going to cost him his peace and comfort.
28:50: Komarovsky tells Lara, “I want to avoid Kropotkin Street.” But David Lean sure doesn’t want to avoid Kropotkin Street, because immediately after Komarovsky says this … BOOM, we find Pasha, still in cuddly idealist mode, marching with his fellow protestors on Kropotkin Street.
Basically, when I’m watching Doctor Zhivago, I feel like I’m God, seeing these humans over in this part of Moscow, and then seeing these humans over here in this other part of Moscow, and they’re all connected somehow, but why don’t they know it??
1:17:19: A green batch of soldiers, riding toward the eastern front, stares at a batch of battle-scarred soldiers riding away from the front and toward home (possibly because they’re not stupid?), while a monocled, mustachioed officer in charge of the new soldiers shouts “Deserters!”
Prompt cut to a grungy-looking veteran in the opposite caravan, who sees the approaching batch of fresh-faced suckers, and mutters “Replacements.”
Oh, I’m a sucker too – a sucker for unexpected David Lean cuts.
For a film that’s almost *cough* as long as this essay is, at times I would even call it, dare I say, impatient? Take the scene where Komarovsky starts chatting with Lara and Pasha in a restaurant, but suddenly, via dissolve, Lean “skips” ahead to a more relevant portion of the conversation, as Pasha explains his determination to marry Lara. It’s like Lean only featured the first few lines of the conversation merely so that he could chop an entire section out and create that sensation of the narration “darting” through time.
Thus, as with Lawrence before it, I admire Zhivago for its odd moments, its flaunting of convention, its unresolved bits, its loose ends left dangling and twisting in the harsh Siberian wind. I mean, here is a film that consists of 1,001 beautiful shots, and yet, what’s the very first shot Lean gives us? Alec Guinness’s crotch.
*****
I should probably talk about the plot?
How do you explain a plot like Doctor Zhivago’s? How do you solve a problem like Maria?
In a nutshell: three guys have the hots for Lara. The older guy who can really help her move up in the world … kinda rapes her? The younger guy who doesn’t have a pot to piss in but at least seems to have a conscience … marries her, disappears, then kinda becomes a heartless brute who never wants to see her again? (I like how, throughout the first hour of the film, Lara is wondering which of the two men she’s involved with is the right one – and the joke is, they’re both the wrong one.)
The third guy is the Goldilocks guy, except the only problem is, he’s … already kinda married? And other than the fact that she’s Charlie Chaplin’s daughter, his wife’s super boring? Oh yeah, and there’s this whole revolution/civil war going on.
They say that Yuri is too “passive” of a character to center a three-hour movie around, but honestly, he’s the one I relate to the most. You know what Yuri is? He’s a part-time Buddhist. He’s a part-time Buddhist in a world populated with full-time assholes.
Here’s how I see it: while everybody else is trying to be the hero, Yuri ends up being an actual hero, not because of anything particularly extraordinary or noteworthy he does, but because he manages, despite the universe apparently conspiring to prevent him from doing so, to quietly, humbly, be a good, decent, caring person. This is his victory.
For instance, after the “Replacements” and the “Deserters” engage in a violent skirmish on the front, the victorious “Deserters,” high on the thrill of sticking it to the man, wander off to wreak havoc elsewhere, but meanwhile, the roadway is littered with, you know, people bleeding to death. Anybody care? Enter Yuri and Lara, who have up to this point been in close proximity to each other, but have never truly met.
“Are you a nurse?”
“Yes.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes!”
Dramatic pause.
“Then help me.”
The initial, isolated notes of “Lara’s Theme” teasingly trickle onto the soundtrack like fingers down the spine and, thank God, at least somebody’s not a power-hungry prick around here. Let the bullets fire and the canons fly into the cold night air, but meanwhile, certain people understand that there are wounds to be healed, rags to be washed, iodine to be poured.
(Side note: Ebert whining about “Lara’s Theme” reminds me of people who whine about “Imagine,” “Hotel California,” or “Wonderwall” – is it really the song’s fault you’re sick of it? And the backstory is priceless: Maurice Jarre had composed a bunch of vaguely adventurous, Russian-sounding material which Lean thought was mostly crap, telling his composer, “Forget about Zhivago; forget about Russia. Go to the mountains with your girlfriend and think about her and write a love theme for her.” After Jarre returned with “Lara’s Theme,” Lean presumably declared, “Finally, something I can use.” I suspect Jarre arranged the tune using every possible permutation of instrument: zither and harmonium, balalaika and slide-whistle … you name it, you got it. And given that the rest of the soundtrack [whether through intention or lack of inspiration], isn’t as melodically potent, every time “Lara’s Theme” pops up, I feel like it’s the audio equivalent of Yuri’s innate, part-time Buddhist essence refusing to die. Alternate theory: Lean’s crippling obsession with “Lara’s Theme” comically mirrors Yuri’s own crippling obsession with Lara?)
By comparison, we’ve got a whole Marvel Universe’s worth of non-part-time Buddhists plopping in and out of the narrative. Where do I start?
I tend to like radical leftists more when they’re the scrappy underdog pushing back against the oppressive right-wing regime. Once they’re actually in power, I guess I don’t like them as much. At some point, the initial goal, which perhaps emanated from a sincere desire to lessen suffering (a goal which I, as a part-time Buddhist, can totally get behind), morphs into a misguided desire to wreak a sort of vengeance, and thus inflict suffering (a goal which I, as a part-time Buddhist, would not get behind). The true believers, in the name of abstract ideology, find no shortage of justifications for their harmful deeds; the violence of the present moment will all be “worth it” when utopia finally arrives, right?
In other words, they’ve got the “mania” in their eyes. No one is going to be able to exorcise it from them. The best one can hope for is to get out of their way and let them inflict their misery on someone else.
Perhaps a fitting subtitle for Doctor Zhivago could be: “A Decent Guy Learns to Dodge Other People’s Mania.” For roughly five seconds, Yuri presumes that the revolution might be fueled by compassion, and then it dawns on him that, nope, wait a minute, the revolution is actually being fueled by a bunch of angry, militant, power-thirsty tightwads. Allow me to employ a tried-and-true method of adding intellectual heft to this essay by quoting George Orwell, who observed that “revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job.” Otherwise, aren’t you just kind of switching masters? Well, considering it took the French about 170 years to figure things out, perhaps we should cut the Russians a break.
Anyhow, when Yuri returns to Moscow from the eastern front, he finds that his family’s cozy two-story house has now been partitioned into living quarters for something like 600 additional occupants – an uncomfortable rearrangement that might have bothered most people, but Dr. Z? He does his best to roll with it, commenting that the new arrangement is more “just.” But what he doesn’t yet understand is that, for the Soviet authorities, the new arrangement isn’t about “justice,” it’s about “vengeance.” In other words, it’s time for privileged bourgeois snots like Yuri and his family to suffer. Who cares whether he “approves” of their ideas or not?
When Yuri mentions Holy Cross Hospital, the party officials quietly register their disapproval. “Holy Cross … what?”
“Holy Cross Hospital. It’s on -”
Without missing a beat, they correct him: “The Second Reformed Hospital.”
“Oh. Good. It needed reforming.” This exchange highlights what I think might be the number one tragic flaw of the Russian Revolution: quiet eradication of all sense of humor.
Approximately sixty hours later in the film (just a guess), Yuri is taken captive by the Red Army and forced to serve as their doctor. Standing in a wheatfield, he watches a clearly underage soldier breathe his last breath. Razin, the Red officer, sensing what’s on Yuri’s mind without even hearing him speak, states, “It doesn’t matter.”
Nevertheless, Yuri attempts to locate that one last tiny speck of humanity remaining inside this impenetrably communist ideologue. “Did you ever love a woman, Razin?”
Razin stares back, coldly: “I once had a wife and four children.”
Well, it was worth a shot.
But if there is one Soviet official in Doctor Zhivago who I would not categorize as being gripped by the “mania,” it would be our humble narrator (and future Jedi warrior), Zhivago’s half-brother Yevgraf. He’s what perhaps the Russian Revolution should have been more like, but wasn’t: a touch more rational. Just as it’s becoming clearer and clearer that Yuri and the revolution are going to go together like oil and water, Yevgraf makes his presence known, in another segment that I find indicative of the movie’s thrillingly unorthodox narrative style.
Here we have an entire five-minute scene between Yuri and his half-brother, and yet, on-screen, Yevgraf does not utter a single word in it; rather, his dialogue is delivered solely through narration, while Yuri’s is uttered exclusively on-screen. As a result, I think Lean generates this rich tension between Yevgraf’s narration, which is awash in the perspective, hindsight, regret, and the accumulated wisdom of a man recalling an event that occurred decades earlier, and Yuri’s on-screen responses, which are purely of-the-moment, and thus painfully ignorant of the fate which awaits him. I feel like the hard-boiled, world-weary charm of Yevgraf’s narration could’ve been right at home coming from the nicotine-stained lips of a film noir detective:
I told myself it was beneath my dignity to arrest a man for pilfering firewood, but nothing ordered by the party is beneath the dignity of any man. And the party was right. One man desperate for a bit of fuel is pathetic. Five million people desperate for fuel will destroy a city. That was the first time I saw my brother, but I knew him. And I knew that I would disobey the party. Perhaps it was the ties of blood between us, but I doubt it. We were only half-tied anyway, and brothers will betray a brother. Indeed, as a policeman I would say, “Get hold of a man’s brother and you’re halfway home.” Nor was it admiration for a better man than me. I did admire him, but I didn’t think he was a better man. Besides, I’ve executed better men than me with a small pistol.
Well come on, if they weren’t able to escape the wrath of Yevgraf, then how much better could they have been? Funny how he never states precisely why he disobeys the party in this instance. Does he feel that arresting this harmless poet and/or doctor would be the, you know, wrong thing to do? (Let’s consider it one more beguiling mystery in a film littered with them.) I also dig how Yevgraf is able to walk into a room and instantly force all the inhabitants to scurry away with one quick finger snap. I should’ve learned that trick in my camp counselor days.
“I told them who I was. The old man was hostile, the girl cautious, my brother…” Go on, go on … “… seemed very pleased. I think the girl was the only one who guessed at their position.”
Yevgraf picks up on Yuri’s failure to emit the slightest hint of caution or mistrust, as the poet tells the officer, “You’re just as I imagined you. You’re my political conscience.”
“I asked him, hadn’t he one of his own? And so he talked about the revolution.”
“You lay life on the table and you cut out all the tumors of injustice. Marvelous.”
“I told him if he felt like that, he should join the party.”
“Ah, cutting out the tumors of injustice – that’s a deep operation. Someone must keep life alive while you do it by living. Isn’t that right?”
“I thought then it was wrong. He told me what he thought about the party and I trembled for him. He approved of us, but for reasons which were subtle, like his verse. Approval such as his could vanish overnight. I told him so.”
“Well of course I can’t approve this evening something you may do tomorrow.”
To paraphrase a classic Soviet game show: “Survey says? XXX.”
“He was walking about with a noose around his neck and didn’t know, so I told him what I had heard about his poems.”
Ah yes, another one of Lean’s patented “insta-cuts”: we see a suddenly shaken Yuri, tympani rumbling ominously on the soundtrack: “Not liked? Not liked by whom? Why not liked?”
“So I told him that.”
“Do you think it’s personal, petit-bourgeois and self-indulgent?”
Notice Lean and Bolt’s (gasp) respect for the audience here, trusting that we’ll be able to mentally work our way backward and piece the full conversation together.
“I lied.” Yevgraf mouths the word “Yes” onscreen as his narration overlaps, but it’s the “I lied” that’s heard on the soundtrack, not the “Yes,” perhaps implying that the older, wiser man is wishing he could somehow overrule his younger self?
“But he believed me, and it struck me through to see that my opinion mattered. The girl knew what it meant, what it was going to mean. They couldn’t survive what was coming in the city … I had the impertinence to ask him for a volume of his poems, and so we parted. I think I even told him that we would meet again in better times, but perhaps I didn’t.”
Ever found yourself hardly being able to recall an event that, years later, ultimately turned out to be of great significance to you? For me, Yevgraf’s last line almost captures the flavor of that frustration.
So all right, one guy at least doesn’t have the “mania.” I’ll tell you who’s got the “mania” though: Pasha’s got the “mania.” After being spared arrest for handing out leaflets by the serendipitous arrival of Lara, he tells her, “It’s got to be done … for them, for the revolution.”
“Pasha, they don’t want a revolution.”
“Yes they do. They don’t know it yet, but that’s what they want … People will be different after the revolution.”
Uh huh. Sure buddy.
After the czar’s Cossacks end a peaceful demonstration through the novel technique of, well, murdering the demonstrators, slicing up Pasha’s cheek in the process, he goes full reverse-Gandhi: “There will be no more peaceful demonstrations.” Honestly, I kind of prefer the peaceful ones myself. Despite this declaration, he still fights, in the name of the government he despises, as a soldier in World War I, and when Lean shows Pasha charging a snowy battlefield straight into the welcoming arms of a convincingly shrapnel-expelling explosion, and then a close-up of Pasha’s broken glasses lying in the wintry wreckage, I’m thinking, “Well, so much for that guy.”
Ah, but get ready for Doctor Zhivago’s biggest “twist.”
Several scenes later, on a cramped train ride to the Urals, as Yuri, wife, and child head east, several passengers begin talking, in almost mystical terms, of a mighty Red general named “Strelnikov.” They talk about him like he’s Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader rolled into one. They talk about him like he’s Omar from The Wire (not to be confused with Omar Sharif). It’s “Strelnikov” this and “Strelnikov” that, “Strelnikov blah blah blah.”
About a minute or so before the film’s intermission, the train takes a breather, and everyone steps outside to warm their legs (and to presumably create some, shall we say, yellow snow). As a red-painted train rushes by, a huge portion of Yuri’s fellow passengers, milling around on both sides of the tracks, raise their arms in the air and shout, “Strelnikov!” (as crowds in Russia are wont to do). An old woman whose village has allegedly been burned by Strelnikov mutters, “Yes … that’s Strelnikov.” Lean cuts to a man standing on the back of the speeding train.
Him?
Him?
Strelnikov is him?
Duuuuuude.
Guess he was able to find a new pair of glasses.
Indeed, Pasha’s got himself a brand new bag – and that bag is cold, clinical retribution. Shortly after the film’s intermission, while wandering just a bit too far from the train and falling into his usual foolish habit of appreciating the beauty of the winter sun poking through the trees and all that sensitive poetic idiocy, Yuri is briefly captured and interrogated by Strelnikov/Pasha/Fuckface/etc. Oh, and a little more backstory: everyone’s been talking about this horrible battle that’s supposedly taking place in Yuriatin. Thinking that certain information will help establish his innocence (as if the Soviets ever cared about evidence?), Yuri explains that he once spent time with Pasha’s AKA Strelnikov’s wife, Lara, during the war: “If she’s with you, I’m sure she’ll vouch for me.”
“I haven’t seen her since the war. She’s in Yuriatin.”
“Yuriatin??” Not the place you want to be, people.
“The private life is dead … for a man with any manhood.”
Ah, but Yuri’s got a pretty sharp bullshit detector. “We saw a sample of your manhood on the way – a place called Mink.”
“They’d been selling horses to the whites.”
“No. It seems you’ve burnt the wrong village.”
“They always say that, and what does it matter? A village betrays us, a village is burned. The point’s made.”
“Your point, their village.”
Point Zhivago.
In the end, Strelnikov can’t even fathom a man who isn’t caught up in the fervor of some cause or another. “And what will you do with your wife and child in Varykino?”
“Just live.”
Just live? Crazy talk.
And this is why I find the character of Komarovsky (played with … let’s call it “relish” by Rod Steiger), despite his many flaws, something of a relief. You’ve got to give Komarovsky this: at least he’s a realist.
“Oh, I disagree with Bolshevism,” he pontificates to Yuri at some point before the horse manure hits the fan, “but I can still admire Bolsheviks as men. Shall I tell you why?” He leans in closely. “They may win.”
Sort of how I feel about the New York Yankees.
The main cast of Doctor Zhivago may feature only one American in it, but he sure makes his presence count. I think Steiger successfully “read the room,” understanding that, if nobody else around him was going to ham it up, then he might as well whip out the bacon, pork chops, and pig’s feet. For instance, if Omar Sharif had been dialed up to 11, Steiger’s “husky Russkie” schtick could easily rub me the wrong way, but instead, I find this little taste of Pasternak Pacino a nice counterpoint to Sharif’s uber-passive poet.
Komarovsky is also, possibly, a rapist? Curiously enough, on the DVD commentary track, Steiger doesn’t seem to interpret the “lovemaking” between Komarovsky and Lara as necessarily rape:
One has always assumed that was her first real sexual experience, which is not (chuckles) the nicest way, you know, and there’s a time of confusion, because the instinct can be partially attracted while the intellect is abhorrent of such a situation. But the one thing that can’t be denied, and that’s what Komarovsky had there, was excitement, whether she liked it or not. That’s what I think part of that look was, and then followed by, “What am I doing, this is disgusting,” then she sees the gun, and you can see how a pattern develops of the dislike for a short period of time. This is brought to you by Sigmund Freud.
Ah, I can see where Komarovsky’s sardonic wit comes from. Perhaps it’s the 21st century gentleman in me, but I don’t find Lara’s response to Komarovsky to be particularly … consensual? Then again, if you’re an actor inhabiting the mind of a character like Komarovsky, I guess you wouldn’t think of yourself as a rapist, would you? Sure Rod, you tell yourself whatever you need to tell yourself to get into the role. He’s just a man of action. While wrapping a bandage around Komarovsky’s wrist after Lara has attempted (and failed) to shoot Komarovsky to death, Yuri asks him, “What happens to a girl like that when a man like you has finished with her?”
Get a load of Komarovsky’s answer:
“Interested? I give her to you. I give her to you, Yuri Andreivich. Wedding present.”
Come on. How can you not like a guy like that?
Then, two whole hours and a full-blown Yuri/Lara love affair later, Komarovsky barges into Lara’s apartment, like a Yeti out of a Himalayan folktale, yanks his hood off, and blows onto his pudgy fingers, before finally asking, “May I come in?” Admit it, the man’s got panache.
Let’s also give it up for Steiger’s flair for playful punctuation: “Now all these are tech-ni-cal-i-ties.” Oh yeah. You know someone was having a good time on this set. “Please don’t underestimate me … practically or morally.” Oh don’t worry, Viktor, I wouldn’t sell you short in either of those categories. But his repentant actions toward the end of the film do raise an interesting question: would you be able to appreciate help … from your rapist?
At first, Lara’s answer is no. Well, Komarovsky’s definitely not the sort who is inclined to make a quiet exit. “You stay here then, and get your DESSERTS!! YOUR DESSERTS, DO YOU HEAR ME?” The man really knows how to leave that hard-to-rinse aftertaste in their mouths. “You think you’re immaculate. YOU’RE NOT IMMACULATE! I KNOW YOU! DO YOU HEAR ME?” Uh, hear you? Well, it’s a pretty quiet neighborhood, Viktor, we don’t exactly live above the local movie theater out here in Yuriatin. “We’re all made of the same clay you know. CLAY! CLAAAAAAY!!”
*****
All right, so I may adore it more passionately than Yuri Andreivich adored Larissa Antipova, and can discover additional elements to appreciate on each viewing to an even larger extent than I can with, say, that drunken Orson Welles wine commercial outtake, so what keeps it at a mere #7? Surely not the impenetrable Russian winter?
Well, for a film that’s supposedly taking place in Russia, anyone else find much of the flavor simply too … British? Casting culprit #1: Ralph Richardson. Every time he opens his mouth, I instantly realize, “Oh, codswallop, I’m watching a British actor in a British film made by a British director.” (“Do you know what a will is, old chap?”; “Brotherhood and fiddlesticks!”; “I’m one of the people too!”; “Oh no, not another purge!”) I say, good sir. I did once see an anonymous internet defender of the film point out that many upper-class Russians in the pre-Soviet era tended to travel to Britain for their education, and therefore might have been more likely to speak English than Russian, but … come on.
And if everybody’s going to speak English, couldn’t they at least agree on an accent? Rod Steiger seems to have opted for some kind of light, quasi-Russian affectation, and I’m assuming Omar Sharif is speaking in his natural Egyptian accent (as if I know the difference between a Russian accent and an Egyptian accent?). Those who’ve griped that Lean may have been too obsessed with the verisimilitude of the street lamps and the railway stations to give a horse’s behind about accents might have been on to something. But in the end, to quote Razin, “It doesn’t matter.”
Also: you won’t see me attempting to write the screenplay for a labyrinthine historical epic any time soon, but I occasionally pick up vibes of Robert Bolt desperately attempting to shoehorn tidy explanations of events into slightly implausible dialogue. Take the scene after Russia’s withdrawal from Word War I, where an automobile cruises by, tossing out leaflets. (Sidenote: is there anyone who can do “Parted crowds of sitting people gradually rising to greet a moving vehicle” shots like David Lean can? No. No, there is not.)
Yuri snatches a leaflet from the air and promptly reads it aloud: “The Czar’s in prison. Lenin’s in Moscow. Civil war has started!” Well, that certainly was handily informative.
In response, Angry Defecting Soldier (fresh off muttering “Replacements” on his way to stoking a mutiny), barks, “Good!”
Lara, God bless her, doesn’t sound quite as thrilled. “Civil war, good?”
“Not good, comrade nurse, inevitable.” The fact that he might be right about this … still doesn’t lessen the urge I have to punch him in his small-minded face.
Just then, Old Average Uneducated Citizen Guy, conveniently loafing around so that he’s able to stand in for millions of the film’s less knowledgeable viewers, asks a rather useful question: “This … Lenin, will he be the new czar, then?” Geez. Come on, buddy.
Angry Defecting Soldier’s been waiting for this moment ever since he crawled out of the womb: “Listen, daddy! No more czars. No more masters. Only workers, in a workers’ state!” Hey, sign me up, let’s do it.
But in Bolt’s defense … raise your hand if you’ve majored in Russian history. Tell me the difference between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. Explain to me why the “October Revolution” technically took place in November. Convince me that, when I say “Reds” and “Whites,” you don’t assume I’m referring to wine (or amphetamines).
Ironically, my attempt at highlighting a flaw might have inadvertently highlighted a virtue. Just think about how much dumber Bolt and Lean could have really let the screenplay become. I can see it now – some cigar-chomping studio executive attempting to make the film more “marketable”: “Why don’t we make Komarovsky the czar, and make Strelnikov Lenin, you know, simplify things a little bit? Let’s see what Mel Gibson could do with this sucker.”
*****
And now, to go back to where I began: the ending.
The chunk of Zhivago that would perhaps best allow me to summarize why I can’t ever get my fill of it might be the very chunk that became my serendipitous introduction to the film. Oddly, for a movie that is notorious for featuring a plot that meanders almost as maddeningly as this essay does, I find the last twenty minutes or so exhilarating in how it so stylishly and methodically presents me with a plethora of intriguing, self-contained set-pieces in tidy bursts:
1) Only David Lean could make a man waking up in the middle of the night, sitting at a desk, and writing the first initial lines of a poem seem like the most majestic moment in the history of 20th century letters. Imagine Lean filming me at my computer, right now. It would blow your mind.
Alas, Yuri’s pen is interrupted by a wolf howl, but relax, kids – it’s only a metaphor! See, the wolf is the “outside world,” conspiring to tear Lara and Yuri asunder, but here is one poet who’s not scared of any of your damn Russian winter metaphors.
Although he knows he can only keep the menace at bay for so long, he nevertheless steps outside and whisper-shouts “Shoo!,” temporarily frightening the wolves away. Turning around, what does he see? The glow of the candle through the frost-smothered window – his transitory bubble of safety, a bubble destined to be punctured at any moment, but by God, bubbles like this one are meant to be taken advantage of before they burst.
When Lara cries out, “Oh Lord, this is an awful time to be alive,” Yuri courageously objects:
“No, no …”
I’m telling you, this guy should win the Part-Time Buddhist Lifetime Achievement Award.
2) Ah yes, the one time Yuri and Lara witness a man barge into their living quarters and are glad it’s Komarovsky. He pulls Yuri aside and makes a persuasive sell:
These men that came with me today as an escort will come for her and the child tomorrow as a FIRING SQUAD. Now I know EXACTLY what you think of me and why, but if you’re not coming with me, she’s not coming with me. So are you coming with me? Do you accept the protection of this ignoble Caliban on any terms that Caliban cares to make? Or is your delicacy so exorbitant that you would sacrifice a woman and a child to it?
Seriously, who wouldn’t want to spend a night in Vegas with this guy?
(And another thing: Ebert was talking out of his ass when he complained about Lara refusing to take Komarovsky’s offer of escape, because, the second time around at least, she does take it. A swing and a miss.)
3) Yuri pulls what one might call a “Casablanca” i.e., he pretends that he’s about to join them on their trek to safety (even handing them his cherished balalaika), but Lara knows better. Despite Lean’s supposed tendency to craft every moment to burnished perfection, I appreciate how he allows Lara’s last ever words to Yuri, “We’ll see you at –,” to remain tantalizingly unfinished. Punk rock!
And now, isn’t this where we came in? Yuri rushes through the uninhabitable, icicle-drenched portion of the house and attempts to open a window before finally concluding, “Fuck it, I don’t have time for this,” picks up a pipe, and blasts a hole through the glass (and they say he’s a passive character) because, damn it, he needs that one last glimpse of the receding dot that is supposedly Lara as she disappears over the frigid, brutal horizon. Yeah. Oh yeah. Even a man with a heart of ice such as myself, who tends to yawn at “lovers departing forever” scenes, can feel this one. Let’s call it the “Zhivago Threshold” for passionate romance: say you’re “in love” as much as you want to, but until you show me you’re willing to break a glass window, I’m just not buying it.
4) Oh, that’s right, Alec Guinness and the peasant girl at the dam. That’s where this whole thing started. “So he never saw her again?” she asks, Yevgraf clearly tempted to shout, “Well, just shut up and watch the next two minutes of the movie.”
Not even she wants to get her hopes up that she’s the offspring of anybody remotely interesting. I guess fifteen years eating of potatoes and porridge will do that to you. “Why won’t you believe it? Don’t you want to believe it?”
“Not if it isn’t true.” Realism that would have made Komarovsky proud.
5) Yuri’s heart attack. Ebert calling this scene “unforgivable”? That’s what’s unforgivable. I don’t know, I’d rather have too much drama and passion in my film than not enough. What is up with these people? And apparently, given the state of the Soviet health care system in those years, this sort of thing happened all the time. Maybe Dr. Zhivago could’ve used a better doctor.
6) Despite this shot of Lara and Yevgraf searching for her lost child in a random schoolhouse being only twenty seconds long, I feel like I could watch a spin-off movie based on this one shot alone. Who are these children? What are their families like? What neighborhoods do they live in? Where does their teacher come from? What subjects are they learning? Like, this schoolhouse feels real, these children feel real, the teacher feels real – as far as I’m concerned, they were already here when Lara and Yevgraf walked into the frame, and they’ll still be there when the camera cuts away.
7) “One day, she went away and didn’t come back. She died or vanished somewhere in one of the labor camps, a nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid. That was quite common in those days.”
And they say Doctor Zhivago is “sentimental.”
8) One more ace David Lean sneakeroo: “You work here?”
“Yes, Comrade General,” says the peasant girl’s boyfriend. “I’m an operator.”
“And what do you operate?”
She points with glee: “That.” Oh smack.
Seriously, they were chatting on top of a stunningly photogenic dam the whole time? You win this round, David Lean. You win this round.
9) As the peasant girl strolls back into her life of quotidian obscurity (which, to be fair, she seems to be enjoying more than her alleged parents ever did their own), a balalaika suspiciously similar to the one Yuri carried around with him ever since his mother’s funeral sticks out of her belongings.
“Can you play the balalaika?” Yevgraf asks.
“Can she play?” her boyfriend shouts. “She’s an artist!”
“An artist? Who taught you?”
“No one taught her.”
“Ah,” Yevgraf sighs knowingly. “Then it’s a gift.”
And so this three-hour-and-twenty-minute film ends … on a pun. But it’s a poignant pun.
A certain film critic whose name I shall not mention (let’s just say it begins with “Pauline” and ends with “Kael”) once complained about Zhivago’s final shot, stating something to the effect that it was a falsely optimistic sop to the Russian people which condescendingly suggested that all the horrors they’d gone through eventually would be “worth it” in the end. But I’ve always interpreted the final shot of the dam more like this:
For years upon years, whether under a clueless czar or under a mustachioed maniac, life in Russia has been shitty. It will probably be shitty again. But on this one particular day, in this one particular spot, for one lousy millisecond, water is gushing out of a dam, and you know what? Life is good. And when those days come along, you better savor them. Because those days are gifts.
You think that random stranger at the library will get off my case now?