Doctor Zhivago turns 60: David Lean’s sweeping romantic remnants remain | Drama movies

TThere is no more perfect example of the cinematic crossroads of the mid-1960s than Julie Christie’s 1965. First, she starred as an immoral fashion model in John Schlesinger’s Darling, a snapshot of swinging London that reflected the fashionable, garish, progressive culture that seduced the young. She then starred as an elusive Russian beauty in Doctor Zhivago, a three-hour historical epic by David Lean that was as dull and old-fashioned as Darling was suggestive of the future. There was an appetite for both books that year – thanks, at least in part, to Christie’s stunning appeal – but there was a sense that one era was colliding with another and that times were about to change.

It seems fitting, then, that Doctor Zhivago is about what happens when history takes a turn and a group of rebels makes a once familiar and stable place seem completely unrecognizable. It’s easy to imagine a master like Lean, who had made Lawrence of Arabia a few years earlier, feeling a bit like his hero, Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif), a famous poet whose works suddenly lost popularity after the Russian Revolution. Although Doctor Zhivago was honored with a host of Academy Award nominations—and five awards, mostly in technical categories—many contemporary reviews dismissed it as a fossilized romantic tale, divorced from the harsh realities of early-to-mid-20th-century Russia. Even 60 years later, it feels like a relic of a bygone era.

However, there is still a kind of magic in the film, due to Lean’s unparalleled sense of scale and how he elevates a love affair that survives the turmoil of war, fate, and a distance that stretches from Moscow to the Ural mountain range. While it’s true that Doctor Zhivago isn’t the most objective treatment of Russian history, Lean is more concerned with individuals swept up in a current that has no ability to bend, which is terrifying but also deeply romantic as a story-teller. That’s the trick of love stories set against turbulent backdrops: there’s an urgency to get off the plane and a passion that normal times can’t replicate. Kisses explode like bombs.

The stakes were much lower for Lynn’s Doctor Zhivago than for Boris Pasternak’s original novel, which so enraged the Communist Party that it had to be smuggled out of the Soviet Union for publication in 1957. (Pasternak was also not allowed to accept the Nobel Prize, which he won a year later. His son finally accepted it on his behalf in 1989.) Working once again with Lawrence of Arabia screenwriter Robert Bolt, Lean gives this historical moment appropriate scope while pulling back on its politics and showing a lightness of touch carried over from T. E. Lawrence’s Adventures in the Ottoman Desert. In this, he is not unlike Zhivago in an early scene in which his hero stands on his balcony and witnesses peaceful protesters being slaughtered by Tsarist knights. He sees everything but clearly feels apart from the action.

The film harks back to a poignant framing story in which Zhivago’s half-brother (Alec Guinness) interrogates a young woman he believes is Zhivago’s long-lost daughter, and the film settles in 1913 Moscow, a city on the cusp of World War I and the Russian Revolution. The orphaned Zhivago makes a comfortable living as a famous doctor and poet, engaged to Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin), the daughter of the family friends who raised him. Meanwhile, 17-year-old Lara (Christie) finds herself caught up in the affections of Viktor Komarovsky (Rod Steiger), a wealthy brute who is also attached to her mother. But Lara’s heart belongs to Pasha (Tom Courtenay), an idealistic young Bolshevik whose resolve hardens after facing violent government resistance to his cause.

The film subtly suggests the inevitability of the romance between Zhivago and Lara, while they are separated for most of the first half, waiting for World War I to unite them on the front lines, where they care for the wounded as doctor and nurse. While the two remain loyal to Tonya and Pasha, respectively, their feelings for each other are too overwhelming to be suppressed, especially since history itself seems to be playing matchmaker. Only behind the snow-covered windows of an abandoned house deep in the Ural Mountains can their love find a place to flourish, and inspire Zhivago’s greatest book of poems.

Clocking in at roughly 200 minutes, with room for a prologue and an introduction at the intermission, Doctor Zhivago is a clunky beast of a film, with little of the speed of Lawrence of Arabia, not to mention the intimacy and wit of leaner, “smaller” love stories like Brief Encounter. However, the magnitude of the production, along with its staging of conflicts such as attacks on protesters or the chaotic early days of communist rule, is as compelling as the lean epic gets. Although Lean’s intrepid Zhivago sympathizes with the revolutionaries to some extent, he, like everyone else in this world, reacts and adapts to circumstances that are far beyond his control.

As Pasha tells Zhivago late in the film, after the Civil War ends, “Personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it.” Pasha used to love Zhivago’s poetry, but the feelings and passion within him had not only become meaningless, but were now anti-communist. Lean heroes don’t tend to be the warm-blooded type, and to that end, Zhivago seems resigned to the fact that he simply lost popularity through no fault of his own. He’s not even upset when he finds out that his house in Moscow has been divided into residences for 13 different families, because it seems fair and there’s nothing he can do about it anyway.

However, the famous bitter cold of Doctor Zhivago – the ultimate home video experience on a long winter afternoon – melts whenever Zhivago and Lara steal some time together, away from the turmoil of their country and within their families. Theirs is an “us against the world” story that inevitably leans toward tragedy, but the film is a reminder that love endures through dark times, as does the art that comes out of it. For this reason, Doctor Zhivago may seem like a relic, but he is also immortal.