Dr. Zhivago

Oscars come a lot easier than Nobel Prizes, so don't be misled when the little statues make their rounds on Academy Awards night. Carlo Ponti's production of David Lean's film of Boris Pasternak's novel should be avoided at all costs.

It opens with credits superimposed over a crayon drawing of grass, trees, and the like, which dissolve into Alec Guiness's boots, whence we pan up to Guiness's face. And from here Dr. Zhivago begins a long downhill trek, surprising us about every ten minutes when it can't get worse but does.

Guiness portrays a combination hero's-brother-in-law-secret-policeman-movie-narrator, who, at the outset, is confronted with Rita Tushingham as an orphaned Russian peasant girl. Miss Tushingham has wisely made a habit of playing lasses of English extraction, but by the mere application of a little makeup and a babushka she become as Russian as Lithuania.

Anyway, Guiness supposes that this peasant girl is really the long-lost daughter of deceased poet Yuri Zhivago and his mistress, Lara. To confirm this judgment, he flips open a volume of Zhivago's poetry, revealing pictures of both the poet and his mistress--Omar Sharif and Julie Christie.

Now, if Julie Christie had been my mother I don't think I would have forgotten, but Rita Tushingham unfortunately has. Unfortunately, because it gives Guiness an excuse, however lame, to launch into the three-thousand-seventeen-minute story of Dr. Zhivago and his small circle of intimates.

We meet the young doctor as a med student in pre-World-War-I Moscow, explaining to his superior that he would rather practice than do research, on account of liking people. But as it turns out, Zhivago spends most of his life writing poems, and the only time he practices his trade is when the Bolshiveks kidnap him and force him to care for the people he loves so dearly.

So the conflict is like this: Should Zhivago be allowed to live an idyllic existence, alternating between his wife, Geraldine Chaplin, and his mistress, Julie Christie, and all the while pen those poems? Or should he, like any decent fellow, devote some of his energies to aiding his fellow man?

One senses that Pasternak had something else in mind and screen writer Robert Bolt also. Presumably we are supposed to identify with Zhivago, whose individualism is being cramped by the system. But it's not easy to identify with a character who does nothing but write poems we never see. In fact, the only evidence for Zhivago's poems is that he looks at the moon a lot and seldom speaks; and while Sharif can look at the moon with the best of them, it's not enough to make a character.

Nor is the dialogue especially scintillating. Omar Sharif reads aloud a newspaper headline: "The Czar's in prison, Lenin's in Moscow, civil war has broken out!" Ralph Richardson, on learning that the police have been knocking at his door, exclaims: "Oh no! Not another purge?"

Julie Christie would be the picture's saving grace if she had more to do or say in it. Geraldine Chaplin might as well start her career all over again; certainly no one should hold this first role against her. Actually, Zhivago's only well-thought-out role falls to Rod Steiger, who makes the most of it and--by way of reward--gets to take Julie Christie off into Siberia at the end.

Then we return to the present (c. 1950) where Rita Tushingham has finished listening to the tale we've finished watching. Leaving Guiness, she walks across the top of a huge dam, accompanied by her balalaika and finance. Guiness cries out to the latter. "Can she play?" and the finance replies that Rita has been able to hold her own with a balalaika since birth.

"Ah" says Alec Guiness turning to the audience to deliver an aside not unlike one of George Burns's in the old Burns & Allen show, "Then it's a gift!" Some laugh; some cry; others are already on their feet, dancing in the aisles. Boris Pasternak never had it so good.