Adapted from the novel Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Yuri Zhivago doesn't want much out of life: just to settle down to a quiet life with his wife and daughter, practicing medicine and writing poems in his spare time. However, a couple of minor obstacles keep getting in his way. One is a hauntingly beautiful but troubled woman named Lara with whom he keeps crossing paths; the other is the Russian Revolution.
Personally, I found this novel incredibly difficult to follow. All the characters are referred to by multiple different names, and I had a very hard time keeping everyone straight. Conversations between characters were frequently recorded without any indication of who was speaking, so I often found myself having to re-read several pages when I realized that my initial assumptions about who said what were incorrect. I'm not sure if this is more a reflection on the book or on me as a reader, but I feel like either way, this makes me rather ill qualified to judge how consistent the film was with the book. There were lots of things in the movie that I didn't remember being in the book, but whether that's because they weren't there or because I didn't catch them, I can only guess at this point. Of course, I'm still going to do my best for the sake of the blog.
The movie has some issues of its own, but I at least felt like I mostly knew what was going on. It's much easier to keep characters straight and tell who's talking when you can see and hear them. As far as I can tell from my limited comprehension of the book, the essence of the story was fairly consistent, but the details were often quite different. While there were probably some parts of the book that I didn't understand or remember enough to recognize them in the movie, I know there were definitely at least some things that the book merely implied that the movie chose to show, and vice versa. For example, the movie shows more of Yuri and Lara's affair, while the book mostly focuses on Yuri reflecting on it later. On the other hand, Yuri being captured by the Red army and forced to be their medic takes up a good chunk of the book, and it goes by very quickly in the movie. This is particularly odd because overall the film's pace is excruciatingly slow.
This might have just been my own personal interpretation (or misinterpretation), but the movie seemed to me much more explicitly anti-Communist than the book. The novel certainly showed characters suffering because of the unstable political climate, but the reasons behind their suffering seem much more subtle than in the movie. I don't remember Yuri publishing poems early in the book, but in the movie he's kind of famous for his poetry, which the Reds later forbid people from reading. The film also completely changes the reason Yuri's family moves from Moscow to Varykino; originally it was to get away from fighting, but the movie makes it to get away from the redistribution of their house to people who hate them because they used to be wealthy. In a way, it feels like the book is more critical of the Revolution, and the movie is more critical of its aftermath. That's an oversimplification, I know, but it's the gist of what I got out of this.
Coming up next: the 1966 Best Picture Winner, A Man for All Seasons. Both the play and the screenplay were written by Robert Bolt, who also wrote the screenplay for Doctor Zhivago. From what I remember, the story is remarkably similar to that of Becket. So it won't be the most unusual winner of this award, but I enjoyed the film seven years ago, so I'm not sad for an excuse to revisit it.
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