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There’s no more perfect illustration of the cinematic crossroads of the mid-1960s than the year Julie Christie had in 1965. First, she starred as an amoral model in John Schlesinger’s Darling, a snapshot of Swinging London that reflected the trendy, flashy, forward-thinking culture that had seduced young adults. Then she starred as an elusive Russian beauty in Doctor Zhivago, a three-hour-plus historical epic from David Lean that was as stodgy and old-fashioned as Darling was suggestive of the future. There was an appetite for both that year – credit Christie’s astonishing magnetism for that, at least in part – but a sense that one era was crashing into another and times were about to change.
It seems fitting, then, that Doctor Zhivago is about what happens when history takes a turn and a band of insurgents make a once-stable and familiar place seem completely unrecognizable. It’s easy to imagine a master like Lean, who’d just made Lawrence of Arabia a few years earlier, feeling a bit like his hero, Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif), a celebrated poet whose work suddenly falls out of favor after the Russian Revolution. Though Doctor Zhivago was honored with a raft of Oscar nominations – and five wins, mostly in technical categories – many contemporary reviews had dismissed it as an ossified romance, disengaged with the harsh realities of early-to-mid-1900s Russia. Even 60 years later, it feels like a relic of an earlier era.
And yet there’s still a kind of magic to the film, owed to Lean’s peerless sense of scale and how it elevates a love affair that survives the upheavals of war and fate, and a distance that stretches from Moscow to the Ural mountain range. While it’s true that Doctor Zhivago isn’t the most substantive treatment of Russian history, Lean cares more about individuals swept up in a current they have no power to bend, which is terrifying but also as deeply romantic as storytelling gets. That’s the trick of love stories set against tumultuous backdrops: there’s a plane-going-down urgency and passion to them that ordinary times cannot possibly replicate. Kisses detonate like bombs.
The stakes were significantly lower for Lean’s Doctor Zhivago than for the original novel by Boris Pasternak, which had so rankled the Communist party that it had to be smuggled out of USSR for publication in 1957. (Pasternak was also not allowed to accept the Nobel prize he’d win a year later. His son finally accepted it on his behalf in 1989.) Working again with Lawrence of Arabia screenwriter Robert Bolt, Lean give this historical moment the appropriate scope while retreating from its politics, displaying a lightness of touch that’s carried over from TE Lawrence’s adventures in the Ottoman desert. In that, he’s not unlike Zhivago in an early sequence where his hero stands on his balcony and witnesses peaceful demonstrators slaughtered at the hands of tsarist dragoons. He sees everything but feels distinctly removed from the action.
Flashing back from an affecting framing story where Zhivago’s half-brother (Alec Guinness) questions a young woman he believes to be Zhivago’s long-lost daughter, the film settles in 1913 Moscow, a city on the cusp of the first world war and the Russian Revolution. The orphaned Zhivago lives comfortably as a doctor and celebrated poet, engaged to Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin), the daughter of the family friends who raised him. Meanwhile, the beautiful 17-year-old Lara (Christie) finds herself snared by the affections of Victor Komarovsky (Rod Steiger), a rich and connected brute who’s also involved with her mother. But Lara’s heart belongs to Pasha (Tom Courtenay), an idealistic young Bolshevik whose resolve hardens after encountering violent government resistance to his cause.
The film deftly suggests the inevitability of Zhivago and Lara’s romance while keeping them apart for much of the first half, waiting until the first world war to unite them on the frontlines, where they tend to the wounded as doctor and nurse. While the two remain faithful to Tonya and Pasha, respectively, their feelings for each other are too overwhelming to suppress, especially as history itself seems to playing matchmaker. Only behind the snow-frosted windows of an abandoned manse deep in the Ural Mountains can their love find a place to flourish, inspiring Zhivago’s most treasured book of poems.
Unfolding over roughly 200 minutes, with space allotted for an overture and an entr’acte at intermission, Doctor Zhivago is a lumbering beast of a movie, with little of Lawrence of Arabia’s fleetness, much less the intimacy and wit of “smaller” Lean love stories like Brief Encounter. Yet the sheer enormity of the production, along with his staging of conflicts like an attack on demonstrators or the chaotic early days of Communist rule, feels persuasive as only a Lean epic can. Though Lean’s intrepid Zhivago sympathizes with the revolutionaries to a point, he’s like everyone else in this world, reacting and adapting to circumstances that are far beyond his control.
As Pasha tells Zhivago late in the film, after the civil war is over, “The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it.” Pasha used to like Zhivago’s poetry, but the feelings and affection within them are not only rendered meaningless, but now stand out as anticommunist. Lean’s heroes tend not to be the hot-blooded type, and to that end, Zhivago seems resigned to the fact that he’s simply fallen out of favor by no fault of his own. He’s even unperturbed to discover that his home in Moscow has been splintered into residences for 13 different families, because it seems just and there’s nothing he can do about it anyway.
Yet the famously bitter cold in Doctor Zhivago – the definitive curl-up-by-the-fire home video experience for a long winter afternoon – thaws whenever Zhivago and Lara steal some time together, away from the tumult in their country and within their families. Theirs is an us-against-the-world story that inevitable bends toward tragedy, but the film is a reminder that love perseveres through dark times, as does the art that spins out of it. By that token, Doctor Zhivago may seem like a relic, but it’s also enduring.
