David Lean
Doctor Zhivago

Anything can happen to Dr. Zhivago. In the end, he dies, but in a way, he deserved it. You don't get involved with a woman in the middle of a war. Well, let's let it go; after all, it's cinema—pardon, it's literature. Because, before becoming a famous film (astronomical revenues everywhere and 600 days of programming in the city of Rome alone!), "Doctor Zhivago" is a book, an old-fashioned novel, a hefty tome by Boris Pasternak, who, like the Zhivago in the book, would experience every imaginable hardship. Forcibly exiled from the USSR and forced not to accept the Nobel Prize, Pasternak over time would be considered a 'cursed' writer due to his political beliefs, which would cost him pain and sacrifices.

David Lean, three years after the splendid "Lawrence of Arabia," decides to bring Pasternak's hefty novel to the big screen. The endeavor is insane in itself because Zhivago is an insane character: a man in love with love, capable of doing anything to be with his beloved, yet unable to untangle himself from politics, precisely the politics that ruined his life. A not very flexible hero, a hero who does not perform great heroic acts, a tormented hero, as the legend goes.

Lean, a great aesthete of spaces and images, transfers "Doctor Zhivago" to film with an almost disproportionate grandiosity: large panoramic shots, lengthy takes halfway between touristy and exotic, love scenes that must always be epic (a hug always assumes the contours of a majestic farewell), and chooses Omar Sharif as the film's protagonist. Not a great actor (surely there were better ones around: Peter O'Toole, Alec Guinness, David Niven, George C. Scott), but an actor pliable enough, somewhat wooden in certain details (looks, kisses, embraces), but useful for action scenes, those where more presence and substance are needed rather than class and acting skills.

The female lead, that is, the woman loved by Zhivago (the famous Lara), is played by Julie Christie, and it's the happiest and most suitable casting choice. Light as a feather yet stunningly beautiful (though these are personal tastes), Christie proves perfect for the role of Lara, chiseling it as she wishes, making it her own, holding its coordinates, and winking with stunning delicacy and sincerity. But while Christie is perfect, Sharif is respectable, and Lean's direction, though colossal, is always elegant, what doesn't work is the screenplay. And it’s not that it doesn't work occasionally; it never works. After all, bringing a novel like Pasternak's to the screen is incredibly difficult; it requires almost complete reworking, almost all the lines need rewriting, and you have to find a way to connect so many scenes with each other without distorting the original story. The task was entrusted to someone who should have been an expert in screenplays, Robert Bolt, already the screenwriter for "Lawrence of Arabia." He wrote the first one so well and this one so poorly. Scenes that often go nowhere, pointless and boring connections, dialogues often ridiculous, a never-ending finale that botches, in a few minutes, the key scene of the entire film: Zhivago's death.

Lean can do little or nothing more; he films the movie with consummate professionalism and tries to patch the glaring holes in a screenplay that is inexplicably convoluted.

So this "Doctor Zhivago" is not an absolute masterpiece; it's a respectable film, a success that went down in history more for hearsay than for real artistic merits, technically fairly successful, but also excessively mawkish, at times even a bit forced in its ostentatious desire to move, a bit heavy (it lasts a little over three hours), undoubtedly interesting, worth watching because it's nonetheless a much-talked-about movie (so much so that it was even honored by Nanni Moretti in "Palombella Rossa") with one truly beautiful thing: the Oscar-winning soundtrack by Maurice Jarre.

It won 4 other Oscars, all fairly deserved, except for the scandalous one for the screenplay. Mysteries of Hollywood!