Doctor Zhivago (Two-Disc Special Edition)

Media:	DVD
Directed by:	David Lean
Starring:	Omar Sharif, Julie Christie
Release date:	24 September, 2002
List price:	~~$26.99~~
Our price:	$20.24 that is 25% off!

Doctor Zhivago (Two-Disc Special Edition)

Average rating: Stars

My How Time Flies

Having just viewed this movie for the first time since I saw it in the theatre as a young teenager, it certainly is not the boring, snow-covered insipid political love story I remember. Lesson learned - when you're a teenager you think you know everything; when you're in your 50's, you realise how silly and foolish you were in your youth.

This is a great film. David Lean was truly the master of the epic genre. He managed to focus on the personal stories of 3 people while the "epic" serves as the backdrop - genius! And, an epic it is - will all the bells and whistles. However, one finds oneself so engrossed in the storyline that the cast of thousands; hundreds of horses; incredible scenery seem mere props.

A very young Julie Christie steals this film. Everyone else, including the good doctor himself, seems like a supporting player to her incredible Lara. Other actresses of her age(I believe she was 22 or 23 when this film was made) would have wilted next to the likes of Rod Steiger and Omar Shariff but not Ms. Christie. She chews them up and spits them out before we're a half hour into this 3-hour epic. It's almost tragic that her subsequent body of work is so erratic and beneath her talent level. With her Oscar-winning performance in "Darling" and this film being released the same year, she really had no place to go but down. T'is a pity she's reduced to cameo roles, voice-overs and supporting bit parts these days.

If you saw this film before and didn't like it, you owe it to yourself to watch it again. It's quite remarable.

That said, I still find that insipid, intrusive and cloying "Lara's Theme" as annoying as I did as a teenager. Some things never change :)

Doctor Zhivago (Two-Disc Special Edition) - Omar Sharif, Julie Christie

Fantastic

The movie was great & I am glad that I purchased it. I compared the prices to a few other stores and I found that this one was the cheapest. I would recommend it to anyone!

Omar Sharif, Julie Christie - Doctor Zhivago (Two-Disc Special Edition)

"More of your high-minded lunacy?"

DR. ZHIVAGO is David Lean's magnum opus film adaptation of Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning semi-autobiographical novel of the same name (Pasternak declined accepting after the authorities told him that if he went to Oslo he could never return to the U.S.S.R.).

Lean's production seems rather more perfectly realized than the book (at least the English translation) despite its dangerous swerves to the edge of soap operatics. Fortunately, Lean's tight direction keeps the film from ever going over that edge.

A true epic from the era of epics, the sweep of DR. ZHIVAGO is as vast and complex as Russia and the Revolution itself. Lean captures the street scenes of "Bread and Land" demonstrations perfectly (according to one who was there), and imbues his characterizations with a depth and sensitivity not often seen on film.

The film's protagonist, young Dr. Yuri Zhivago, a noted physician and poet, finds his bourgoise life turned topsy-turvy by first the Great War and then by the Revolution. The greater external crisis of his time is matched by a personal crisis of equal internal dimensions, as he is torn between his two life's loves, his devoted wife Tonya (played by Charlie Chaplin's daughter, Geraldine), and Larissa Antipova (the beautiful Julie Christie), the wife of the hidebound, heartless Bolshevik, Strelnikov (Tom Courtenay).

Lean performs a nearly impossible task, capturing the mental landscape of a poet through a series of scenic cutaways that would have seemed ridiculous in the hands of another filmmaker.

Zhivago himself (played by Omar Sharif) is a sensitive, dewy-eyed man who is never able to surrender his personal life or his art to the Revolution. As seen through Zhivago's eyes, the Revolution appears coarse and impermanent. Although primarily a love story (Zhivago is Pasternak and there was a real "Lara" by the name of Olga), the Soviet authorities could never tolerate Dr. Zhivago's vision, and branded the book politically subversive. The humorless self-importance of the "New" Russians is indictment enough for an era.

Made in the days before CGI, the fifty thousand extras in this film actually are fifty thousand extras, and the sets are fully-realized buildings. An early reviewer criticized the "jack-built sets" (which theater did he walk into?); the incredible ice palace at Varykino has attained a kind of film immortality. So has the score, highlighted by the dramatic and romantic "Lara's Theme."

Excellent supporting roles are played by Rod Steiger as the amoral but pragmatically principled Komarovsky, Siobhan McKenna and Sir Ralph Richardson as the Gromykos, and Sir Alec Guinness as General Yevgraf Zhivago, Yuri's half-brother whose filial devotion is the underpinning of the entire film.

Films simply aren't made this way anymore.