Wasted Opportunity

vox-sane

Pasternak's novel was a love story tucked in an epic set against the turbulent Russian revolution.  The novel itself, with its story of illicit love in  time of war, was almost the GONE WITH THE WIND of its day.  When the time came to make the movie the task fell, quite naturally, to epic film maker David Lean, winner of the Academy Award for his last two pictures (BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA).  Lean and screenwriter Robert Bolt (A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS, LAWRENCE) did a superb job of distilling the essence of the novel, but left out many characters and events in their 197 minute motion picture (which, until the advent of Lucas and Spielberg, was one of the highest grossing movies ever).  Robert Bolt won a deserved Oscar for his work on DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, for his job was formidable.  But now that Pasternak's epic sweep was personified by Lean and Bolt, a television version was needed whose focus was Pasternak's (admittedly soap-opera) story without sacrificing any of the other events for time limitations.

The television version that finally appeared was barely an hour longer than Lean's.  It would be unfair to compare this version to Lean's, which had a powerhouse cast (Christie, Steiger, Richardson, Courtenay, Guinness), a director with an eye for the cinematic, and a superb script.  However, when some of the same sorts of scenes appear, the new version seems like a hollow echo.

This new version also truncates the novel.  The dialog is pedestrian.  In the old days British television would make adaptations of novels this size that went on for months (ZHIVAGO could sustain it).  The interiors were videotaped like stage presentation and the exteriors were shot on grainy film, but the breadth of great novels came across.  Four hours was not time enough to do justice to Pasternak.  Everything seems to boil down to sex in this version, which is daring -- for the 1960s!

On the plus side, it must be said that Keira Knightley (Lara) is pure sex on the screen.  Her character is hardly the thrall of Komarovsky she is in the novel (the victim she is in Lean's movie).  Again, this might have been daring forty years ago.  It seems the writers of this movie missed the other revolution (the sexual revolution) that might've gotten them past this approach to the material to focus on the larger view of the Russian revolution the novel presents.  We had the love story, done a whole lot better, decades ago.  We're still waiting for a version that does justice to Pasternak.

score /10

vox-sane 3 November 2003

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0881244/