The first time I watched Doctor Zhivago was about 30 years ago. A friend picked the movie, and I watched it over at his house with his parents. For whatever reason, they kept the volume very low, and I never bothered asking them to turn the volume up. As a result, I missed out on a lot of the dialogue, didn't follow what was going on in the plot, and got totally confused on who the characters were. Regardless, even though I was maybe 21 or 22 years old, I don't think I was the right age for this film to fully appreciate it, even if I could have heard what was going on.
Now that I'm in my 50s, and I have a little bit of life experience behind me, it's much easier for me to tap into what these characters were going through -- not that I've ever been through a World War and a Communist Revolution, but I'm maybe better at comprehending the idea of what people will do to survive, and how some people will cling to the idea that life is about more than just surviving.
Yevgraf Zhivago (Alec Guiness), half-brother to Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) is an interesting person to "narrate" the story. Yevgraf has a position of authority in Stalinist Russia, and he's been able to maintain it without being purged. Over the time that he has been a General, he does what little he can to assist his brother. And the film is bookmarked with his desire to help the daughter of Yuri and Lara (Julie Christie). The young woman never knew her parents, and when I watch her and Yevgraf have a conversation -- when, essentially, Yevgraf is telling this woman the entire story of her parents and everything they lived through -- I find myself thinking: Man, she is so simple-minded, and she acts a lot younger than she is -- like she's a child in an adult's body. Even after hearing the story, she doesn't want to accept that Yevgraf is her uncle and that he just wants to be there for her, as a member of the family. Perhaps it's simply too much to accept that people can be there for one another, because in the Soviet Union, as Pasha (Tom Courtenay) tells Yuri, history has killed the personal.
What is life without the personal? Without real human connections? What makes life worth living at that point? The Soviet reality is a world where anything you have -- possessions or relationships -- can be taken away from you in an instant.
There's no reason to summary the story. Doing so would just make it sound like a sensational soap opera. Suffice it to say, Yuri and Lara are in love, but circumstances make it impossible for them ever to be permanently together. Eventually, they realize that they must simply cherish the limited amount of time they have together, and that's what they do.
Why does Yuri love Lara? That's a question I saw someone ask in a review. Well, why does anyone love anyone? It's enough that the movie visualizes quite clearly how they each feel about one another. Director David Lean will, for example, shift the lighting so that it focuses just on their eyes. We are forced to look at Yuri's eyes as he looks at Lara -- and later, the same technique is used when Lara looks at Yuri. This focus on the eyes isn't done for any other character. Yuri may very well love his wife, and Lana may have loved her husband, but the martial love they each had for their spouses simply wasn't what they felt for each other.
I had forgotten Klaus Kinski is in this one; he plays Kostoyed, a "volunteer" selected to go to work in Siberia. We see him in a bunk in the train car with Yuri and his family. It's weird to see Kinski, such a kinetic actor, restricted in his movement. The most animated he's allowed to get is just to claim that he might be in chains, but he is the freest person heading to Siberia. Whether they wear chains or not, everyone heading to Siberia isn't free. They are all victims of circumstances too great for them to significantly change.
This movie really makes me curious. Why did so many in Russia go along with the Communist Revolution? What did they get out of it? Did they believe in what they were doing, or were they just being pragmatic or opportunistic? I think about the idealist, Pasha, for example. He worked hard to defend Russia from enemy invasion in World War I. He was a revolutionary but didn't envision the lengths Lenin and Statin would utilize. But after his apparent death on the front, he's "reborn" and even changes his name to become General Strelnikov. So many individuals seem to become jaded. They lose their ideals and just go along with whatever forces prevail. Maybe because they learn it's just easier to go with the flow, better to be the ones burning villages than to be the ones living in the villages burned by others.
Rating: 5/5 stars
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