Doctor Zhivago

After reading around the web, few movies attract as many conflicting opinions as Doctor Zhivago, and so it was in our own little household.   Was it too long?  Does it praise Zhivago’s adultery? Are the characters’ actions unrealistic? Go elsewhere and others will answer with a raging “yes” or a shoulder shrug and a smile.  We hardly know what to say ourselves.

It’s even hard to say what this movie is really about.  Yes, it’s about a poet/doctor who apparently loves one woman (his wife) but desires another, the lovely Lara, whom the movie equates to yellow flowers and the blazing sun.  Yes, the movie is also about the Russian Revolution and its aftermath.  It’s also about poetry versus ideology, Zhivago’s private world of family life and writing versus the political reality of the Bolsheviks.

It’s even arguable that this is about the framing device.  The movie is really one long story told by the Alec Guinness character, a high-ranking Soviet who is looking for his niece.  Finding a girl he believes to be the one, he tells her of the father she never knew, the story of the renowned poet, Doctor Yuri Zhivago.  So the entire movie is a Soviet officer’s romantic tale of events, many of which he may be inventing.  Why exactly is he telling it to this poor worker girl?  We think it’s because the girl is orphaned and the officer is alone, both isolated by the grim ideology of the Soviet system.  The story of Zhivago offers them a rare chance to connect relationally, and the audience a chance to see a Soviet humanized.

But above all else, this movie is about movies.  You will see Lara dissolve into a flower.  You will see several seconds of a completely black screen, as a train travels through a tunnel.  You will see the camera pointed at the tops of trees.  You will see a Russian mansion’s interior covered in ice.  These are formal techniques you won’t find in other mediums.  Attach a sprawling Victorian-era plot, a love triangle, and pretty pictures courtesy of David Lean, and it’s not so unclear why people have always liked this movie, despite numerous features easily characterized as flaws.  Doctor Zhivago feels like an event.

Calling Doctor Zhivago a “love story” would be too hasty.  Zhivago does have a inexplicable obsession with his mistress, and the movie accentuates this obsession by showing us yellow flowers and playing the four-note “Lara’s Theme” over and over and over.  But Zhivago is also obviously an adulterer, a fact which the movie makes clear.  For one, his wife is unwaveringly faithful and sweet.  “How could anyone cheat on her?” C. repeatedly kept saying during the movie.  Also, when Zhivago first considers Lara lustfully, we see him only in the shadows, which suggests the blackness of his desire.  Lara herself, a fallen woman of sorts, has been used and abused by two other men in the movie.  When Zhivago asks one of them about her, before he fully knows her, the man replies that he will give Lara to Zhivago as a wedding present.  So Zhivago is one in a line of men to dominate Lara, who consents after initially refusing him. Most telling of all, Zhivago loses his wife forever and is enslaved in the Red Army precisely because he is returning home from a tryst with Lara.

So Zhivago’s adultery is not necessarily mishandled.  Recall the early scene where Lara goes to church.  After she confesses, the priest reminds her of the story of the woman whom Jesus told to “go and sin no more.”  What happened to that woman,the priest asks rhetorically.  We do not know, he answers, and then he exhorts Lara to heed the commandment.   The rest of the movie offers us a chance to see what happens when the characters do not heed that command.  The ones who suffer most: Zhivago’s family.  In the end, Zhivago collapses and dies while frantically pursuing Lara.  This final scene may be unforgivably sentimental, as Roger Ebert argues, but it is anchored in a relevant moral point.

In the background of Zhivago’s follies is the destructive transformation of an entire nation.  Living under the old Russian czar wasn’t so pleasant, but communism couldn’t be said to be much of an improvement.  The movie presents multiple views of the Russian Revolution, primarily from the eyes of Zhivago’s upper-class family.  At times they praise the removal of the old injustice, but what dominates is the fact that everybody gets really poor, really quickly.  Zhivago’s family is hounded by Bolshevik officials, and Zhivago himself is nearly accused of corruption on multiple occasions, though he has no political affiliation.  So the family travels from Moscow to the deep countryside, fleeing the poverty and political oppression of the big city.  The countryside provides respite, but we find civil war raging even there, and the Red Army’s operation, we discover, are everywhere.  For Zhivago and company, there is no escaping a time of terror.  The movie does a good job of conveying the general feeling of catastrophe and economic loss, and this in fact is probably the best reason to see it.

Entertainment: 9

Intelligence: somewhere between 2 and 8

Morality: 7 (a couple of risque scenes, and this score will drastically drop if you think the adultery is glorified)