David Lean (1965)
Forty-odd years on, it’s startling that David Lean’s storytelling is so shapeless and that the military violence – whether it’s the Moscow police trampling street protesters before the Revolution or the First World War battlefield – is slackly photographed and edited. Robert Bolt’s writing tries to go further than the history book dialectic of Lawrence of Arabia (and the 1966 screen adaptation of his play A Man For All Seasons) but Bolt has little talent for distilling complex human relationships and much of the dialogue is either enervated or flabby. Yet it’s easy to see why Doctor Zhivago was a huge box office success – it’s an emotionally powerful love story; and Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, as the lovers, have not just the looks but true star power. Because the screenplay fails to dramatise the crux of the Boris Pasternak novel – the doomed determination of Yuri Zhivago to remain true to his beliefs during a time of massive political and social upheaval – the film risks being offensive, in seeming to treat the historical context as merely a backdrop to the love affair of Yuri and Lara. But the other side of this coin is that the scale of the public events has the effect of making the love story a grander passion; Maurice Jarre’s insistent, lush, soaring music reinforces that effect.
Sharif gives a performance of considerable charm – and there’s more to the portrait than you might have remembered, including a core of moral stubbornness and an awareness that Yuri Zhivago is helpless to resist what his moral sense impels him to do. (What Sharif can’t suggest is the intellectual complexity that Peter O’Toole conveyed as T E Lawrence and which did so much to obscure the thinness of the Lean-Bolt characterisation of Lawrence.) Julie Christie’s newness as a screen presence – in combination with Lean’s habitual inattention in directing actors – works for and against her. She avoids the kind of overworking that you get from some of the seniors (Siobhan McKenna, Klaus Kinski) but she sometimes seems stranded – lacking the experience to know what to do with lame lines and static situations. Yet she’s remarkably unself-conscious (and all the more beautiful as a result); and this early work reminds you that, although she’s not always been inventive enough to make you believe in an unconvincing character, Christie is a reliably truthful actress. Especially in her scenes with Rod Steiger as Komarovsky, she’s vividly expressive. You’re never quite sure who Komarovsky is, except that he’s well connected – and keeps himself well connected in the flux of Moscow society both sides of 1917. Steiger is powerful and subtle: his reaction when Lara shoots him at a lavish Christmas party is one of the best moments in the film – he looks shocked more by the social than by the physical implications of what has happened.
There’s a good performance too by Tom Courtenay (as the young revolutionary who hardens into a part of the post-Revolution hierarchy) and a marvellous one from Ralph Richardson (as Zhivago’s uncle) – even though some insensitive underlining by the director detracts from some of both actors’ best moments. As Richardson’s daughter (and Zhivago’s wife), Geraldine Chaplin is mostly much more natural and likeable than in her later screen roles. There’s a particular pleasure too – in retrospect – in seeing some of the supporting players: not only regulars in British films of the period like Geoffrey Keen (as the senior medic under whom Zhivago studies) but also actors like Erik Chitty and Peter Maddern. They were moderately well known at the time for their work on television; now that work is largely forgotten and unseen, it’s affecting to see them immortalised through their small but memorable parts in a big film like this. With Alec Guinness, uncertain and erratic as Zhivago’s brother (their relationship is unexplained during much the story), and Rita Tushingham, as the love child of Zhivago and Lara. (She’s got the Slavic looks but it’s hard to credit her as the progeny of Omar Sharif and Julie Christie.)
27 July 2008
